Focus Media Arts Centre Blogs

This week, the Multi-Media group started working on creating a webpage that we coded ourselves. We had a partner and also had to brainstorm in order to continue with our project. Shian did briefly explain to us about coding and got us comfortable with coding. She also managed to get us closer by making us work in partners over the course of the summer. Shian also did an amazing job at taking us through the coding process and having the patience to teach us step by step if we were struggling. When we were finished, we showed off our web pages to everyone else. On Thursday August 16th, we started another group project where we have to come up with a virtual reality themed webpage. Basically we insert images into 3D objects and have people connect to the mini-VR (virtual reality) app and move around to read certain stuff on the web page. Shian also demonstrated to us most of the common parts of VR coding. By: Divine Bailey

This week, the Multi-Media group started working on creating a webpage that we coded ourselves. We had a partner and also had to brainstorm in order to continue with our project. Shian did briefly explain to us about coding and got us comfortable with coding. She also managed to get us closer by making us work in partners over the course of the summer. Shian also did an amazing job at taking us through the coding step by step and having the patience to teach us step by step if we were struggling. When we were finished, we showed off our web pages to everyone else. On Thursday August 16th, we started another group project where we have to come up with a virtual reality themed webpage. Basically we insert images into 3D objects and have people connect to the mini-VR (virtual reality) app and move around to read certain stuff on the web page. Shian also demonstrated to us most of the common parts of VR coding.

By: Levi Linton This week introduced some new techniques to the group as well as the development of old ones. We began the week by learning about basic computer coding and how we can use the language in our projects. We began practising our skills on MIT App Inventor, which is an online gaming engine which allows anyone to create applications for the computer and Android devices. The objective by the end of the week is to produce an engaging app for the audience assigned to each group. Everyone has ideas, but now they must execute them. Continuing with the projects from last week, interns have been editing their footage, planning out their independent project ideas and finishing their articles. Matthew has already written the script for his independent project and is in the process of finding actors to feature in the short feature film. Radio Franco is airing their third show on Wednesday with featured guest, Sekouba. The RPTV team is in the process of editing their pilot show Wha...

This week marked the first full week for new Regent Park Focus Summer Staff. New Media Coordinator Shian has been leading the interns in a morning course about Interactive Storytelling. After an exercise in re-adapting TV scripts, the staff were split into two groups and wrote a script and filled out call sheets for a pilot episode of an interactive web series. Last week Music Production Coordinator Levi has been helping youth create their own beats. There’s plenty of room for more students, so come by any weekday from 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM and learn about music production, editing, and mixing! In the afternoons staff have been researching and writing their own articles for the monthly Catch Da Flava Magazine. The pieces are looking to all be very interesting, so keep an eye out for the online and in-print release! The staff continued their work on producing shows for the TV and radio station, getting familiar with the inner workings of film and radio production. Groups started f...

<start> Tuesday, April 17th marks the start of the Web Game Development Program. I am pleased to have participants of various coding backgrounds, who are eager to learn new skills. One student has self-taught experience, and another just wrote his first line of code in class Tuesday afternoon. We covered an introduction to the course, and discussed overall goals and possibilities. I included a fun quiz on Kahoot, and enrolled them in a simple Google Classroom that I created for file and information-sharing purposes. I taught a beginner lesson on how to use HTML and CSS Tuesday, and plan to begin the first project next week. My hope is to have participants form project teams in the following weeks, but some participants are only able to attend on specific days. As the course progresses, I am confident participants will have clearer goals as to what they want to create. For now, I am teaching the basic curriculum to the students, and also adapting it to individual s...

The 12th of April saw the students learning skills in Maya (Hyper shade). At the end of the Lesson students can now apply color (blinn) to primitives using the hyper shade. - Jude

1. Setting Project folder on the desktop and MAYA (3d software) and how to be organized when working on a project. 2, Then,the class learnt how to clean up images in Photoshop(Organic Modelling) and the eventual importation into Maya to start modelling. The Students were beaming with interest,enjoyed the class as its a new area though tasking. Next week we hope to put some finishing touches into these by revising this topic. - Jude

Hi all, Yesterday saw another modelling class with a new student added to the family! This time we also played around with some animation. We will continue in our growth! Jude.

"The energetic youths of the community converged on the said date full of excitement for yet another skills for industry training in Maya. Guess what, it was the 3D Artist Jude Ifesieh a long time volunteer with the Regent Park Youth Media Arts Center on the wheels steering this workshop. At the end of the workshop, youths could now navigate through the Maya 2017 interface with ease, learnt some of the industry standard for low poly models,all that is new in Maya and were all fed to a treat with Pista. What a great way to keep updating your skills. See you there in our upcoming !!!!" - Jude

On Wednesday the 31st of January 2018,we continued our training in Modeling (Interface Training) using Maya 2017 Student version. The following topics were covered extensively with activities by the student : 1.Menu Set 2.Channel box 3.Tool Box 4.Quick Layout Menu 5.Shelf 6.Some hot Keys 7.The Extrude tool 8.The X,Y,Z. axis. Homework was given for the next class,and next week we shall be learning how to set a project in Maya. - Jude

RPF Indie Game Dev Catalyst Club After a break at the end of the summer, the Catalyst Club is back and on a year long journey. For the returning youth, the first month of the year long program has been a time to wrap up on their summer projects while eyeing year long projects to start working on.  They're not beginners anymore, their ambitions have grown and they are building the courage (and skillsets) to start creating their dream games. For the new faces, the first month has been a challenging series of mountains to climb, building their programming and design proficiency while also working through tough questions of choice like "what do you want to create?".  Having reached the summit of basic skill development, they are now eyeing first projects to begin working on and/or additional skill set to acquire. Stay tuned to hear about the projects being developed and workshops being offered. By:  Fernando Restituto ...

This week (Aug 21- 25) for the Regent Park Focus Summer Program, participants wrapped up video editing for the Neighbourhood Kickstart Summer Camp program and held a screening of the videos on Wednesday, August 23rd. Youth participants were also there to film for the screening and get feedback from the summer camp. A few participants focused on preparing a segment on Student Life and Mental Health for Catch Da Flavour Youth Radio. For the first half of the segment, students had prepared a pre-recorded interview with registered psychologist and media personality Doctor Oren Amitay, to comment on the current climate of mental health among the student body. For their second half, they discussed their personal experiences in school and how it has affected their mental health. A few other participants worked on developing their games, such as a Tic-Tac-Toe platform, a Pokemon-style game located in the neighbourhood of Regent Park, and a mental-health themed game. They have bee...

This week (Aug 14-19th) Youth participants finished up their rough edits for the ten part video series in partnership with The Neighbourhood Group Kickstart Program. Participants collaborated to create uniformity in the videos by creating the same background images, credits reel and font type, to build communication skills and teamwork abilities. The rough draft of their videos were completed by the end of this week. Some participants also participated in the youth radio program Catch Da Flava. This week they focused on the issues of affordable housing, looking at local speakers on the topic and current events on affordable housing in Toronto. They had guest A.J. Withers come to studio to talk about the topic and their book on the topic. For the second segment, they had a panel discussion on affordable housing. A handful of participants also continued development in gaming, learning how to work with various different gaming programs and software. Some finished up ...

This week (Aug. 7-11) youth participants had another show of Catch da Flava youth radio, exploring the topic of race in North America. The first segment involved a debate with two participants along with a moderator and judge. The second segment focused on a discussion of race in general. The debate involved answering whether racism in Canada against Indigenous people was worse than racism in America against Black people. Participants were also engaged in assisting with filming for a community partnership with The Neighbourhood Group’s Kickstart Camp, and The University of Toronto. Topics covered and filmed for included “Everything Free”, “Freedom & Peace”, “End Bullying”, “End Racism”, and “Fresh Water.” Camp kids were ready to film, having memorized their scripts and provided visuals and some choreography for their filmed segments. Later in the week, participants commenced work on video editing the filmed footage, along with working on revising their proposal...

We’re into the swing of August now, and today’s class is playing through Mario levels, examining and determining “difficulty ratings” of the challenges presented to the player. Certain challenges will kill you if you fail. Others will not. Do the ones with greater reward have harsher potential punishment? Where do they occur? And just what is “skillgating”? Cutting edge game-analysis here in class…. even if the game is 30 years old. Other students, less interested in analyzing platformer games but more interested in telling stories through interactive means, are working on their individual projects… the fantasy WWE game has music being coded in, and in Blender3D, another student’s dreams of a death-spirit from a void realm has simplified into “I’m going to make a geometric animation for my stream channel”. So now we’re figuring out how to make pentahedrons out of a cube. Meanwhile, other students are creating custom “Pokemon” in our growing database of a combat ...

With the first month of the RPF indie game dev catalyst club drawing to an end, there's a lot to talk about.  The young creatives have answered the difficult question of "what do you want to create?" with some pretty awesome projects.   After picking up basic programming skills, one creative has begun working away at a graphic novel game.  You play as an emerging WWE character with the ambition of winning the women's championship belt. "Make alliances and beef with foes in this game of social choice." Produced using Renpy. A group project has been started.  One youth has been diligently learning C#, Unity and the Dungeons and Dragons gaming system with the intent of designing and coding a Pokemon-like battle system.  Two other youth are also learning Unity and C#, their plans are to code the adventure mode (over-world) and menu systems that will, with the battle system, complete a simple/small Pokemon-like game.  However, the collab...

July 17-21 This week participants at Focus submitted three story ideas for radio show Catch da Flava, with an emphasis on social justice topics. They had a meeting about their pitches and presented them to everyone, and scheduled in which show they will be presenting their stories. They worked on securing a guest for the topic, learning how to write a radio script, having suggestions and revisions to it, prepared to be on-air for the next week. Some of the topics included were interviewing the cartoonist and author of Asylum Squad, Sarafin. Also, some participants wanted to discuss the experience of an international student, and another participant wanted to have a debate on whether racism was worse in Canada or the U.S. Along with this, a few participants focused on completing video editing projects and working on learning how to create their own games. By: Judy Pham

Hello, my name is Jacob and I’ve been facilitating the game design program lead by Fernando. The second session Fernando taught students Deondre, Ron, and Jose the visual language program known as Scratch to prepare them for creation of simple animations for their game. I and one of the students Lam taught me the process of creating my own character in a virtual reality game called Dungeons and Dragons. Together we worked on a spread sheet where we had to think of a character name, character class, supplies the character would carry, statistics, and personality traits. The process was long and confusing however; it was fun to learn and to hear how my character would act in the real virtual game once the character creation was completed. It’s good to see these students gaining new skills and knowledge of design so they could incorporate it into their mindsets to benefit themselves. By: Jacob Hong

Thursday July 28th 2016 As every other Thursday, today was another day of video game design with Eddie! For today, we decided to move away from 3DS Max a little bit and get into the Unreal Engine. He taught us a number of things like how you can create so many different types of games with Unreal Engine like first person shooters, third person games, vehicle driven games, birds eye view games, 2D games and a whole lot more. For Todays lesson, we just used the third person style. We started off by learning how to use the controls in Unreal and what all the basic options are. We then started modelling standard primitive objects like tables, chairs, etc. and then he taught us that we can actually enter the world as a pre-built character as we’re building it to test it out. He went to teaching us how to build stair cases and ramps for our characters to interact with. Once we got used to the basics of the Unreal Engine, we went back into 3DS Max and he taught us how to build somethi...