Welcome IPR Graduate!

Posted by admin on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Hello everyone!

This is the first post on the IPR Alumnus Blog! We at IPR are all very excited about connecting with our graduates and we have exciting things planned for you! For starters, we are planning monthly IPR Alumni events here on campus. The first event is scheduled for Tuesday. May 12 from 6pm – 8pm. Each event will have a theme; the first event will be focused on Digidesign Pro-Tools 8 and new M-Audio gear. There will be food and gear give aways – more details soon. We will be hosting events every second Tuesday of the month from then on.

Again, welcome to the IPR Alumnus Blog.

The IPR Career Services Team

Posted in Alumnus, Alumnus Announcements | No Comments »

John Mellencamp: American? Yes! Fool? Hardly!

Posted by admin on Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Mellencamp celebrates.

Though I’ve never actually heard an entire John Mellencamp album, I’ve long admired him as an artist/activist and person of principle–sort of a shorter, less pompous Bono. As his meta-Lefsetzian music business analysis in today’s Huffington Post reveals, he’s also a keen observer of human nature and a much better writer than the New York Times’ latest guest columnist.

Warner Music Chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman shares the industry’s latest recipe for well-earned extinction at last year’s Web 2.0 Summit.

Not that the Farm Aid co-founder covers much virgin territory–where he excels is situating the industry’s* collapse in the broader context of our current economic woes**. Plus, Mellencamp has the insight to use “bean counters” exactly where–and how–the term should be used. And, without reaching deep into the insult drawer, there’s no better term for describing the incurable mooks who’ve been running (and mostly staffing) corporate labels since the early ’90’s.

Lest we forget, the con artists, shysters and bloodsuckers of the world wouldn’t get far without nutjobs to help distract America’s legion of sheep. This one wrote a song!

*”Industry” as in what’s left of the moribund corporate record labels formerly known as “major.”

**Hit the link for Matt Tabbai’s ridiculously illuminating piece about how little Wall Street cares for Main Street.

Posted in Multimedia, Music | No Comments »

Laffoley, Fractals, Entheogens, Music…Who Is This Guy, Anyway?

Posted by admin on Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Laffoley: No matter how you see the world, he’ll change it.

A huge Paul Laffoley fan since the mid-90’s, I regularly poke around online for new revelations. (As with Serindia’s long-awaited Atlas of Tibetan Medicine, I’m beginning to wonder if the catalogue raisonné announced years ago will ever materialize.) Though I’ve previously visited the part of Miquel.com devoted to the artist’s work, I had no idea the site was so expansive. Proprietor Michael Coleman’s manifest interests include (for starters): design (heavy emphasis on geodesic dome pioneer Bucky Fuller), transhumanism, math art, seriously weird random images, Robert Anton Wilson, music as a spiritual pursuit (with Coltrane as exemplar, how can he go wrong?), celestial maps, thrift store record jackets, health-related topics, contemporary society, The Holy Mountain, Bonnaroo, entheogens, aggressively goofy Youtube footage, cryptozoology, UFOs, free online stuff, everything optimization, self-education, and climate change. How does Coleman finance the behemoth? Mostly out of pocket, I’m guessing, though he gratefully accepts donations and, with the maestro’s blessing, sells Laffoley posters unavailable elsewhere. Drink deep. Visit often. And most importantly, send money. Given the operation’s rate of expansion, dude’s bandwith and hosting costs can’t be negligible.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=1047727585872707322" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

Laffoley spoke his first word–”Constantinople”–at six months, then clammed up for several years.

Posted in Art and Culture, General Media, Multimedia | 4 Comments »

Fat Kid Wednesdays: Parallel Music For Parallel Worlds

Posted by admin on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity; and it was not meant that we should voyage far. –H.P. Lovecraft

Fat Kid Wednesdays lay waste to Paris.

Compass points, roads, and maps work fine for mundane travel but invariably prove useless for intrepid souls bent on exploring America’s many transdimensional gateways and pocket universes. Even the most potent combination of trial-and-error, word-of-mouth, reading between lines, and seeing between cracks does little to augment the mechanisms driving our usual guides: chance, chaos, and intuition. (I stand with 1927 Nobel winner Henri Bergson in maintaining that, like intellect and will, the last is a legitimate faculty, )

They’re better now.

And then there’s luck, or more precisely, the grand old Middle English equivalent: “haps.” For years, Fat Kid Wednesdays have held down a Monday night residency at the Clown Lounge. And for years—as in “more than five”—bassist Adam Linz has graced my inbox with timely info on the night. I’m exceedingly fond of the band. I’ve written about them. I own Singles and The Art of Cherry.

Speaking of transdimensional gateways…

Why then, did I wait until Monday before last to finally take the plunge? Every long-lived enterprise needs newbies all the time, to fill in for the inevitable dropouts, move-aways, and bandwagon-jumpers till the early adapters start bringing their kids. If nothing else, I make a dashing relief player, with great tipping and artist appreciation skills.

Too many reinforcements spoil the plot. Don’t let this happen to you.

Or maybe it’s taken me all these years to accumulate enough haps for the journey, to earn the knowledge that the quickest route out of Saint Paul leads down the stairs to the left of the Turf Club’s entrance, past the ancient, smoked glass panel that may or may not hide something on one side from something on the other, past the landing where darkness and the tattered remnants of old conversations swirl like dead leaves—especially past the tiny foyer with the unsettling geometry where hardly anybody lingers for more than a few minutes. (Simply glancing at one of its angles can permanently turn a sensitive individual into H.P. Lovecraft minus the language skills.)

One wrong turn in the Turf Club’s basement and you could end up like poor Henry Anthony Wilcox.

By the time I enter the Clown Lounge proper, a goodly chunk of my topside personality is gone, torn away by whatever unseen forces maintain the wormhole I’ve just passed through. As with most forays into quantum reality , I don’t notice a thing at first. Neither does my traveling companion—Villanova—who generally fares better on the other side of one or more looking-glasses than in mundane reality. At least she doesn’t say anything. But Villanova’s not a talker. (To be continued.)

Goodness!

Posted in Blogging, Multimedia, Music | No Comments »

An Interview with “The Wheelman’s” Lead Mission Designer Mark Thompson

Posted by admin on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Diesel’s got cheese and I don’t care.

Even Vin Diesel probably didn’t anticipate the success of 2004’s Escape from Butcher Bay, despite his role as the lead character Riddick. The mature (for a point of reference, think of HBO’s prison drama “OZ”) first-person videogame tie-in to the box office flop “The Chronicles of Riddick” overcame the dirty licensed property stigma and is now considered by many one of the greatest games of the last console generation. But can Diesel’s own Tigon Studios (one half of Butcher Bay’s developers) use their videogame sorcery to stave off the insatiable franchise demons once more?

Forgive me. Technically the studio’s next project, “The Wheelman,” exists solely as a videogame property. A film set in the same universe starring Mr. Diesel entered pre-production years ago, and was supposed to see a simultaneous release with the videogame, but as far as we all know, the film’s stuck in development hell. I blame the low ticket sales of “Babylon A.D.,” “Find Me Guilty,” and “The Pacifier.”

It’s a shame, though. Hollywood (always) needs more high-speed chase movies, especially those teeming with special effects-free “airjackings” (see the video below).

Mark Thompson of Midway Newcastle, the other half of “The Wheelman’s” two-part development team,  might have one of the most challenging positions associated with the project. As the lead mission designer, he must sculpt the game mechanics and narrative  into an elegant and cohesive form; keeping in mind desired game length and player expectations. If he’s not creative enough, players might get bored repeating the same types of missions over and over again. If he becomes too ambitious, the game might become a mess of experiemental design – never really capitalizing on what works. On behalf of Red Flag Media, I recently interviewed Thompson. Finding myself with a surplus of information. I pieced the best of the best into the Frankestein Q & A below.

IPR: How involved with the project was/is Vin Diesel?

Mark Thompson: Vin Diesel has been involved from the very start of the project. Wheelman was always intended as an intellectual property (IP) that could be developed across multiple platforms in a way that strengthens, rather than compromises, the IP. Wheelman is far from being a movie tie-in game and Vin Diesel and his Tigon studio have already proven that they are more than capable of delivering quality in this space. As well as being involved in the development process Vin Diesel plays the protagonist of Wheelman, Milo Burik, lending his voice and likeness to the role.

IPR: How did “The Wheelman” benefit and/or suffer from having two developers?

MT: When you have a collaborative relationship with a studio like Tigon there are only benefits to be had. They have been an excellent resource for us, bringing in Hollywood script writers and storyboard artists to nail the cinematic scenes which drive the game’s narrative. They also have some very experienced creative development staff, people who worked on the much lauded “Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay”, for example and they play the game as much as we do and are a constant source of invaluable feedback.

IPR: Where did the inspiration for “airjacking” come from?

MT: A key component of Wheelman is the fast paced vehicle action. Visceral combat can leave your car a burning wreck, tires shot out, chassis twisted, moments from explosion. This isn’t the time or place to pull up to a stop, get out, find another vehicle, walk to it, get in, accelerate up to speed. The airjack allows you to leap through the fire and flames and into another moving vehicle. This maintains the speed and intensity of the chases, something you will really miss when you play similar games without the airjack mechanic.

IPR: Early previews indicated 80% of gameplay would involve driving, with the other 20% focusing on foot. Since then, have these percentages changed? Additionally, would they change if you were to make a sequel?

MT: I think that number is still accurate, although it’s hard to quantify that given that a number of objectives in the game can be approached in a vehicle or on foot, or even a combination of both. For different players that number could be very different. As for shifting the balance in a sequel, I’m not sure I would want to change this and detract from the awesome vehicle-based experience that we have created with Wheelman.

IPR: Since so much of the game takes place in the vehicles, a lot of people are assuming the gameplay will get old very quickly. How do you plan on proving them wrong?

MT: I think is a mistaken assumption based on people’s experience with other games which, on the surface, look similar. With Wheelman we went very deep on the driving experience, from the outset we wanted to redefine vehicle combat and the car chase experience. The unique supermoves like the cyclone and aimed shot are just a small part of this experience. When you add in the over the top blockbuster story, driven by the intense mission-based gameplay, there is no danger of repetition. Rarely has a game like Wheelman taken tightly choreographed mission gameplay to the production levels traditionally seen in first person shooters and injected the speed and ferocity, whilst at the same time empowering the player with an arsenal of supermoves and objectives that can be approached for a number of different ways. When I see people playing through the later missions in the game I still get caught out, surprised by the way people approach an encounter, making choices that seemed totally illogical for me but given their experience and their freedom to choose it makes perfect sense for that player.

Posted in Gaming, Industry, Multimedia | No Comments »

E-Newsletters Coming Soon!

Posted by admin on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Check back frequently for the latest news from IPR.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Destineer Studios presents — STOKED! Snowboarding for XBox360

Posted by Kyle Stallock on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Wednesday, March 4. 5:30 PM, Robinson Hall:
Destineer Studios presents — STOKED! Snowboarding for XBox360

Tony Chiodo — Director of Product Development / Producer
Adam Burback — Test and Certification Lead

In addition to a rare in-depth one-on-one conversation about the video game industry and STOKED! with these veterans, there will be product demonstrations and several lucky IPR students will receive FREE copies of the game!

FACT: Did you know that the game industry seems to be recession-proof? Overall, total sales, including hardware, software and accessories rose 34 percent versus a year ago hitting $1.18 billion FOR THE MONTH OF JANUARY 2009 ALONE!!!

Posted in Newswire, Newswire Announcements, Newswire Events | 2 Comments »

Grant Flesland of Princess Records

Posted by admin on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Grant Flesland, Princess Records and Adam Levy, IPR Student Success Coordinator

Grant Flesland, from the local indie label Princess Records, was the guest at DIY 360 on Friday, February 13. Grant is the head of the label and discussed his journey from Nashville audio engineer to running a record label. He described the scope of work he does from poster CD design, A & R, choosing acts, connecting with media , distribution, to dealing with manufacturers. He described the shifts from retail CD sales to online and digital commerce.

DIY 360 is a weekly event hosted by Adam Levy. The goal is to introduce students to professionals in the field who have been successful, frequently by adapting to changes in the business where they make use of multiple skill sets. Guests share information about their careers, their philosophies about professionalism and their art. Guests often give advice to budding artists, entertainment business professionals, producers and engineers. DIY 360 is an opportunity for students to network with those working in the field and with each other as they work toward career success.

Posted in Newswire, Newswire Events | 1 Comment »

Information Superhighway? Over How Many Dead Bodies? Let’s Roll! (Tomorrow, The Good News?)

Posted by Rod Smith on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

“There are numerous positive benefits to the Internet, but..” –RIAA/MPAA sock puppet and hardcore filtering advocate Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

Darnit, Lessig, right again! While Larry Lessig’s recent call to replace the FCC with an iEPA (innovation Environmental Protection Agency) has yet to spur much relevant discussion, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Any future not desperately mired in neofeudalism, hysteria, cowardice, oppression, poverty, environmental devastation, the Cenozoic Era’s tragically premature end, and (worst off all) hopelessly slow pizza delivery absolutely demands–for starters–Network Neutrality and the fastest broadband the laws of physics permit.

Sadly, we humans are creatures of habit, nearly as addicted to dead tech and deader ideas as the parasites who profit from our addictions. It’s only natural that 20th Century economic gatekeepers and their lackeys in government are currently scattering every obstacle at their disposal–from egregiously obsolete IP law to hyper-redundant, alleged “protections”–in progress’s path, every bit as natural as the Invisible Hand that’ll inevitably smack ‘em down like gnats whether or not they win in a short run.

When, we ask, will reality start emulating Charles Stross’s near-future epic, Accelerando, complete with an RIAA so desperate, so destitute, it sells its assets to the Russian Mafia? When will the likes of Senator Feinstein either learn English or explain the Internet’s negative benefits? Would next week be too soon? Tomorrow? While waiting, check out today’s roadblock reports, just for fun. Sure, the perps are our enemies. But they’re also offending the very forces of nature themselves. And those entities never take “no” for an answer.

Net Neutrality, Copyright Spoiling for a Fight

Digg Hackers Strike Next at YouTube

Quebecor Opens Door to Canadian Three Strikes Policy

Media Lobbying: The New Era

Broadcasters Ask Court to Invalidate FCC’s “White Spaces” Order

Big Canadian Websites Want Neutral Wireless

Prosecution Rests Case Against Pirate Bay Admins

Economic Stimulus Scams On The Rise

Web-Savvy Obama Team Hits Unexpected Bumps

Posted in Multimedia | No Comments »

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