Institution’s membership only one given to entire university
Barry Weiss, a Senior Vice President of Animation at Sony Pictures Imageworks, announced on Feb. 2 that the University of New Mexico is the most recent member of the Imageworks Professional Academic Excellence program, called IPAX. The announcement was made at the New Mexico MISP (Media Industries Strategy Project) Conference at UNM.
The IPAX membership will support the interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media Program that is currently being developed at UNM. Other noted academic IPAX members include USC, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Pratt, Otis, Gnomon, Ringling, and DePaul.
“We’re one of 10 institutions around the country to become an IPAX member,” said Christopher Mead, Dean of the College of Fine Arts. “We’re in great company and I’m thrilled to be associated with Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and USC.”
IPAX was created as a way to partner with universities so that they could build programs that would better train students to go into the film and digital media industries
UNM’s program aims to balance breadth with depth, interdisciplinary flexibility with disciplinary rigor. Its objectives are to bring together filmmaking and digital media in a systematically integrated interdisciplinary program; build a native New Mexican Hollywood that uses the unique cultural diversity of New Mexico; train the citizens of New Mexico with both undergraduate and graduate degrees; and foster research through the Arts Research Technology and Science Laboratory at UNM.
Mead continues, “The industry needs artists who are interdisciplinary in their ability to understand both the science and the art of visual image generation as well as the engineering of computer-generated imagery. Conversely, it also needs engineers to develop the programs, but those engineers need to understand how artists create images.
“In this context, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do at UNM in an interdisciplinary way. This program is about the College of Fine Arts working with the School of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences, and every other school and college on campus.”
IPAX was designed by Sony Pictures Imageworks to work collaboratively with academic programs and to nurture future generations of digital media talent by helping member institutions advance their programs with faculty and curriculum support. Through faculty fellowships, IPAX offers in-house advanced training and experience in a real production environment at the Imageworks facility in Culver City, California. At the same time, the educational division of Imageworks has extensive experience in teaching future digital artists.
Other benefits include internships, guest lecturers and guided faculty tours, as well as a vast array of talented artists, supervisors and designers willing to share their knowledge with academia. The IPAX program also offers a yearly review of academic curriculums to help ensure the incorporation of the latest developments in technology and techniques used not only at Imageworks, but throughout the visual effects and digital animation industry.
Media Contact: Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821; e-mail: scarr@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at February 6, 2007 03:21 PM