Nikki Doung, the ARC | Arts + Design Media Fellow, has created these videos that highlight the creative campus and programs at UC Berkeley.
Berkeley Art Studio
The Berkeley Art Studio is a space where students, faculty, alumni, staff, and the public can take classes in a relaxed environment. The studio can be found in a nook behind Sproul Plaza, where non-art majors can participate in ceramics, drawing, painting, photography, and graphic design. All of these classes are extracurricular and open to all, which means that there is no academic pressure. This freedom encourages students to come in during their free time to put in extra work, and gives them the opportunity to produce a tangible object at the end of their course that they are proud to call their own creation.
UC Berkeley Undergraduate Graphics Group: Artistic Development for Animation
The UC Berkeley Undergraduate Graphics Group recently created a decal called Artistic Development for Animation. This elective is for students who are interested in the world building, storytelling and animation. The facilitators believe that this new decal will fill the void of industry and new media-based art. It introduces students with various levels of art experience to the 2D pre production pipeline of animation, which consists of character design, color scripts and storyboards. The students gather in critique groups throughout the semester to follow each other’s processes and watch their stories and animations develop over time. This casual environment allows for friends to be made and ideas to be shared comfortably.
BareTroupe
Berkeley’s only musical theater organization, BareTroupe, is a group of students devoted to their love of musicals. Together they pick and choose scenes and songs from their favorite musicals, and perform them at their end of the year showcase. Within the group, there are auditions for bigger solos and duets, and then rehearsals once a week for months despite their busy schedules, where they create original choreography for their favorite scenes. The small community of passionate students produces an exciting showcase for the larger community of Berkeley to enjoy.
Bio Inspired Design
Robert Full’s Integrative Biology 32, better known as Bio Inspired Design, focuses on the fundamental discovery process. It all started during a study on cockroach’s movements, and they discovered that they compress their bodies by half and still move very quickly. The movements of the cockroach were then used to develop a robot that could assist first responders in search and rescue missions. This discovery led to the creation of this class, which brings together the fields of biology, engineering and architecture, where students extract principles from scientific papers in order to design something new. As Professor Full puts it, “Discovery in one field can change the way another field thinks about what they do, and they develop this extraordinary synergy that puts you in a position where the collective discoveries are beyond what any single discipline could ever do.”