Friday , March 29 2024

The Offering – Animation Short – Film Festival Winner



The Offering is an award-winning short animated film created in almost two years by a group of very dedicated Cogswell College (www.cogswell.edu) students. Since it’s completion in 2010, The Offering has screened at over thirty international film festivals and been proclaimed as an amazing piece of art and cinema. The Offering’s production value is so high and comparable to Hollywood films that it has never had to enter a student film festival to garner wins. Since it’s completion nearly every Alumni that worked on the film is employed in their area of expertise.

The film is loosely based on the love story of the Hindu gods Shiva and Parvati. The Offering was the pilot film for what has become Project X and has served as a great test bed for what was actually possible at an animation school. The latest Hollywood animation production techniques and software were used to create the groundbreaking characters, environments and effects. It pushed the boundaries for student level work and to most experts it appears as a professional level piece.

The Offering was completed as part of a animation production class called Project X that is offered at Cogswell. The writer and director Michael Zachary Huber is an industry veteran that has worked on many Hollywood blockbusters. The soundtrack for the film was created by Jeremy Soule and Jeff Miyahara. Jeremy is the legendary composer that created the Skyrim soundtrack as well as other Elder Scrolls games and more. Another amazing source of help was choreographer, Reshma Gajar, who has done work for several big name celebrities including Madonna. For more information about the film and its crew check out the links below.

Links:
http://www.cogswell.edu/about/the-offering.php
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1184237/

About Project X at Cogswell College

Project X is a cross-disciplinary Project Based Learning class that creates a 3D animated short film over the course of 1 year. The purpose of the class is to expose the students to as close to a studio work-experience as possible while still in school. The students gain experience working as a team and leverage the various skills of the group to create the best work possible.

Facilities and Software:

Project X works in a dedicated lab giving students extensive access to state of the art equipment and software. For hardware, Project X uses Windows based workstations, servers and render farm. For software, Project X uses Maya, Z-Brush, Mudbox, Mari, Houdini, Nuke, Photoshop, Vray, Renderman and After Effects in addition to a variety of plugins and project management tools. Projext X also uses a custom render manager, Hydra, developed as a project by engineering and computer science students specifically for the school’s network.

Student experience and outcomes:

The large group project based environment of Project X gives students a number of valuable experiences and outcomes. The students develop and exercise the skills needed to work effectively with a team over an extended period of time such as: being able to communicate clearly and professionally, how to be a team leader and a team player, the ability to manage the schedule for a number of time-sensitive tasks and how to meet deadlines. Students also develop and refine assets responding to feedback from students that will be using those assets, while also providing feedback on assets that they themselves receive. They develop the ability to investigate and evaluate a number of possible production methods to accomplish the challenges set by the needs of the project. In the end the students have the work that they have created to use in their portfolios which has been refined to extremely high standards and has been proven by having been successfully used in a larger work.

See more Project X films at: http://www.cogswell.edu/student-work/projectx.php

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