Red Stick International Animation Festival Seeking Volunteers!

The Red Stick International Animation Festival is looking for volunteers to work during the sixth annual festival, which will take place Nov. 10-13 in downtown Baton Rouge. Red Stick needs volunteers to work at the festival’s main venues – Shaw Center for the Arts, Manship Theatre, Old State Capitol and Louisiana Art and Science Museum – during the festival. Volunteer duties include taking tickets, checking passes, counting attendance and being available to assist the festival staff with operations. Volunteers must be at least 16 years old and able to provide their own transportation to and from the festival. Children under 16 can volunteer if adults accompany them during their work shifts. Volunteers are expected to be available for four-hour work shifts during the festival.


Volunteers receive complimentary Red Stick Krewe T-shirts and festival Red Passes. (Red Passes otherwise cost $5 per person and allow admittance to festival film screenings and Cartoon-a-Palooza on Saturday, Nov. 13, and access to the merchant's room at Fandemonium, Red Stick's new Con event.) The festival will provide volunteers with a parking pass to use during their work hours.


Anyone interested in being a festival volunteer should attend one of the festival’s informational meetings on Wednesday, Oct. 20 or Tuesday, Oct. 26 at 6:30 p.m. in the Old State Capitol House Chamber. There will be a mandatory training session for all Red Stick volunteers on Wednesday, Nov. 3 at 6:30 p.m. in the Old State Capitol.


For more information about volunteer opportunities, contact the Red Stick Festival Office at 225-366-8473.

Last chance to RSVP for the DM Minor Pizza Night this Thursday at 6 pm

The Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research (AVATAR), Initiative and the LSU Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) will host an information session and pizza night on Thursday, Sept. 23 to let interested students know about the University's new minor programs in digital media and how they can enroll.


The event will take place at 6 p.m. in the CCT Training Room, 338 Johnston Hall. Faculty with the AVATAR Initiative will attend to provide information about the two new digital media minors available to students. One is an art-oriented core that will go through the College of Art & Design, and the other is a technology-oriented core that will go through the College of Engineering. Both minor programs are interdisciplinary, and students will take courses in several departments, preparing them for careers in digital art, animation, electronic composition, character rigging, video game design and more.


Space for this event is limited, so interested students must RSVP to AVATAR Coordinator, Lea Anne Couvillion at leaanne@cct.lsu.edu, today, so we can ensure we have enough pizza for everyone.


For more information on the digital media minors, visit avatar.lsu.edu, and click the "Degree Program" page.

LSU Professors Receive $1 Million in Federal Funding To Advance Digital Media and Computational Science Research

LSU Professors Stephen David Beck and Thomas Sterling received $1 million as part of the appropriations in the United States Senate Omnibus Appropriations Bill for their “Center for Digital Innovation” proposal, which furthers research in next-generation digital media and supercomputer architecture.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was instrumental in securing this and other funding for Louisiana.

“The LSU Center for Digital Innovation is at the forefront of the growth in technology jobs in Louisiana," said Sen. Landrieu. "The funds for this project will help to build LSU’s role in the development and production of digital media and keep the state on the cutting edge of research in computer science."

Beck, Derryl & Helen Haymon Professor in the LSU School of Music, and Sterling, Arnaud & Edwards Professor in the LSU Department of Computer Science, both hold joint appointments with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT. They jointly developed the Center for Digital Innovation proposal to expand research initiatives both are leading to advance components of 21^st century computational science technology.

Beck, CCT interim director, is the University’s lead on the Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, Initiative. LSU approved the AVATAR Initiative in Spring 2008 to create a concentrated academic research program in digital media, including animation, video games, electronic music and digital art.

Faculty with the AVATAR Initiative spent the past two years developing a program that will allow students to obtain a minor in digital media through the LSU Colleges of Art & Design and Engineering, in which they will take courses in several departments, including computer science, electrical and computer engineering, music, art, English, and mass communication, to prepare them for careers in digital media. The University approved this academic program in Fall 2009, and students can formally declare the minor beginning this semester.

Sterling, a former NASA and Caltech scientist who invented the Beowulf cluster that is the building block of the world’s supercomputing systems, leads the Systems Science and Engineering Focus Area within CCT. He and his research team have spent the past several years working on the ParalleX project to investigate how parallel computing environments can run effectively on large-scale machines.

He is part of the National Science Foundation’s Exascale Point Design Study program, the NSF HPC Task Force, the DARPA Exascale Technology and Software Studies, and the International Exascale Software Project. He also is leading LSU’s collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories on the recently announced DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing Program to prototype next-generation supercomputers.

Sterling’s research group is conducting research to determine the execution models, application programming interfaces, system software and hardware the scientific research community will need when supercomputers move from Petascale to Exascale and become capable of running a million trillion calculations per second.

“With the additional funding our proposal has received through federal appropriations, we’re able to advance the research initiatives already taking place on campus and catalyze efforts within the digital media group and the supercomputer architecture group to expand work in both areas and create new opportunities,” Beck said.

For more information on the AVATAR Initiative, please visit http://avatar.lsu.edu.

For more information on the ParalleX project, please visit http://px.cct.lsu.edu, and for more information on the Exascale research taking place with Professor Sterling’s group, please visit http://exascale.cct.lsu.edu.

Digital Media Minors - Pizza Night on September 23rd

The Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research (AVATAR), Initiative and the LSU Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) will host an information session and pizza night on Thursday, Sept. 23 to let interested students know about the University's new minor programs in digital media and how they can enroll.


The event will take place at 6 p.m. in the CCT Training Room, 338 Johnston Hall. Faculty with the AVATAR Initiative will attend to provide information about the two new digital media minors available to students. One is an art-oriented core that will go through the College of Art & Design, and the other is a technology-oriented core that will go through the College of Engineering. Both minor programs are interdisciplinary, and students will take courses in several departments, preparing them for careers in digital art, animation, electronic composition, character rigging, video game design and more.


Space for this event is limited, so interested students must RSVP to AVATAR Coordinator, Lea Anne Couvillion at leaanne@cct.lsu.edu , by Monday, September 20 to attend, so we can ensure we have enough pizza for everyone.


For more information on the digital media minors, visit avatar.lsu.edu, and click the "Degree Program" page.

The Red Stick International Animation Festival announces that tickets for our third annual Princess Ball, an evening of fairy tale magic and whimsey that is an annual highlight of the festival, are now on sale!


The Princess Ball will take place Sunday, Nov. 7 (the Sunday preceding the festival) from 3-5 p.m. at the Old State Capitol in downtown Baton Rouge. Princess Ball tickets are $20 per person, and are available for online purchase at https://www.ticketturtle.co/index.php?ticketing=rsiaf. Tickets are non-refundable, and will be available for sale until we reach capacity at the Old State Capitol.


We hope you will join us for Princess Ball 2010, and for other events taking place as part of the Red Stick International Animation Festival, Nov. 10-13, 2010.

For more information on festival events, please visit www.redstickfestival.org or contact the festival office at 225-366-8473.


Red Stick International Animation Festival
Phone: +1 225-366-8473
E-mail: rsiaf@cct.lsu.edu
Web site: www.redstickfestival.org
Twitter @ RedStickFest

Tickets are on sale now for the performance of Video Games Live (VGL) at the Baton Rouge River Center Arena! The works of original video game composers performed by the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, with a full audio, visual, live performance will take place on Saturday, Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. as the closing event of the sixth annual Red Stick International Animation Festival, which will take place Nov. 10-13, 2010.

To order your tickets, just visit the Baton Rouge River Center's "Tickets" site, operated via Ticketmaster at http://www.ticketmaster.com/search?tm_link=tm_homeA_header_search&q=Baton+Rouge+River+Center. Ticket prices range from $23 to $73 per person, depending on seating.

The Red Stick International Animation Festival has partnered with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) to host this performance at the River Center. Produced by renowned video game composer Tommy Tallarico, Video Games Live is the largest and most successful concert of its kind worldwide, having played in venues on five continents. The performance BRSO and Red Stick will host is the first time a Video Games Live show will take place in Baton Rouge.

In this show, the symphony will perform alongside exclusive game footage synchronized to music and lights on giant interactive screens, with live-action stage performers, special effects and a synchronized laser show. Some audience members will join the orchestra onstage and play video games. There will be a pre-show meet-and-greet event at 5:30 p.m. for all ticket holders.

The Red Stick Festival VGL performance is sponsored by Louisiana Technology Park.

For more information on Video Games Live, please visit http://videogameslive.com/index.php?s=home.

Animation Collaboration

AVATAR is at Animation Collaboration this week. Animation Collaboration is an annual highlight of the Red Stick festival in which artists work closely with teachers and school-age children from Louisiana, helping them create animation about their experiences with various social issues.