Created with Tilt Brush, for Nicole Brown’s BA 390 course.

This animation sets up the major themes of this course, by laying out the 4 major elements of “marketing mix” and exploring what problems we might encounter culturally if there was no such thing as marketing.

This was set out to build each part of the animation around references to classic advertisements, the teacher prioritized keeping the tone light (for an international audience that might not recognizing American ads and movies). Thanks to the flexibility of creating art and animations in VR in real time, using Google’s Tilt Brush app, we were able to completely rethink and re-record each shot in this 3D animation just one week before it’s due date.


Marine biologists place sensors on sperm whales to track their vitals (by shooting the sensor into their skin with a gun). This sensor generates a long spreadsheet of numbers that is very difficult to visualize. Students are asked to look at dozens of different numbers that were generated during the hours that the whale dove deep into the sea to forage for giant squid.

The goal of this project was to display changes in the whale’s internals over time, along with all the numbers from their spreadsheet. The whole journey is sped up to take about 6 minutes instead of 6 hours. The teacher speaks over each section of the journey, giving context for the depth, intense pressures, lack of light, etc. as the whale completely exhausts it’s blood oxygen and muscle tissue. And as an added bonus we threw in two violent interactions with giant squid, as this is the reason the whale is diving (to risk death in order to eat).

It was animated in Autodesk Maya, enhanced in Adobe After Effects, with audio editing in Audition and the final assembly in Premiere.

wr121 : Choosing an artifact , Tim Jensen

This animation offers a wide variety of examples, with making any single item stand out as the the best option. The goal was to help students appreciate how many options they had, without making them focus in on one approach as more valuable than others.

We started out with idea of indiana jones hunting for an ancient valuable artifact, but eventually decided to drop that framing metaphor in favor of always going in many different directions with the imagery. This video was mostly created with a Wacom Cintiq monitor, and Adobe Photoshop. Drawings were compiled and animated in Adobe Premiere. Audio was recorded with Audacity, then processed in Adobe Audition.