Julia Griffey

Class of 2005

Background
I completed my undergraduate education at the University of California at Berkeley where I studied civil engineering and modern dance. After a short stint post-graduation working at the San Francisco wastewater treatment plant, I opted for a career change.

After teaching myself some of the basics of computer graphics, I got a job working as a 3-D animator at a litigation services company. My job was to create animations and graphics that would be shown in court, including many high-profile cases such as the O.J. Simpson's murder trial.

Armed with the knowledge I gained from this position, and with a long-standing passion for textile and clothing design, I became interested in how I could incorporate these skills into the apparel design process. This led to my matriculation in graduate school at Cornell University. There I earned a Masters of Art in Apparel Design, developing a methodology for creating custom-fitted clothes from three-dimensional models generated by scanning actual human bodies.

In 1998, I graduated from Cornell and began working as a new media designer and an instructor in the field of new media. After 10 years, I am still extraordinarily enthusiastic about the field of multimedia; I currently work both as a designer/developer and as an instructor of graphic design, interface design, multimedia and animation.

Thesis direction
My thesis exploration lies within the intersection of human movement and new media. Specifically, I am interested in integrating the human body into a new media experience for the purpose of learning or skill building. Ideally, I would like to create experiences (games, tools or even exhibits) that require the user to interact with the content on a more physical level than just moving a mouse or pressing some keys. And, I would like this interactive, physical experience to provide the user with some type of education or new skill. From the physical engagement, my hope is that the user will gain new insight into the content that they might not have otherwise.

Inspirational links
http://www.djflack.com
http://www.ericmeyer.com(stereotypes)
http://www.nexuslondon.com/
http://www.saulbass.net/
http://www.hillmancurtis.com/

If our bodies know something our minds do not, can the knowledge in our bodies help out our minds? Helen Gummerseimer thought so. Mrs. Gummerseimer was my second grade teacher who taught us the “pronoun-a-la-go-go” to help us learn...

Animation 2 is a course in which students learn a variety of traditional animation techniques. My final project was a short narrative based on the escape of the gorilla, Little Joe, from the Franklin Park Zoo. The entire film...

The interactive memory game was inspired by the phenomenon of DDR I witnessed when making the documentary in the summer of 2003. I wanted to try to make a game that would get players to use their entire body...

"Dance, Dance, Revolution," (DDR), an arcade game made by the Japanese company Kaomi, is the one of the most successful of the physical game genre. While the American version of DDR has only been in existence since 2001, it...

This project was created to fulfill the requirement of an assignment given in Professor Kubasiewicz's Dynamic Typography course. The instructions for this assignment were simply to create a short narrative film. Students could choose between two themes: ñEureka!î or...