by Ali Crolius
Raindrops and yellow leaves are clinging to the clerestory windows of the Fine Arts Center on an October afternoon that hints of colder months to come. Things are getting hot, though, in a third-floor computer-art lab where teaching assistant John Supple and student David Blair are calibrating a device like an omniscient glass eyeball perched atop a tripod.
Bundles of gray cords link the shimmering contraption to Supple's outstretched hand, with which he's tracing a serpentine expanse. Blair, meanwhile, peers into the black screen of a nearby computer, eager as an air-traffic controller looking for a blip of life. A few more snaking motions, a few magic key-strokes from Blair and success! The three-dimensional trajectory of Supple's hand undulates across the screen.
Only 11 more body parts to hook up. Once totally wired, Supple or another "model" can walk across the room, or do a little dance or deliver a karate chop, and his motions will be minutely recorded. In this way, an entire "library of characters" can be electronically stored for animators to draw upon. While Walt Disney had to work frame-by-frame to create that first classic Mouse, UMass animators can create characters with a simple click of a mouse.
How did a one-time drawing studio at UMass come to contain state-of-the-art equipment like this ''motion-capture system''? How did a team of students in disciplines as diverse as ceramics and political science get a chance to mastermind a children's television pilot?
The answer lies in a go-getter named Patricia Galvis Assmus, director of the Center for Research in Art and Technology in the computer arts program.
With flashing brown eyes, umber hair plunging straight down to her hips, and a potent handshake, Galvis Assmus is a force to reckon with even as she makes her way down the halls of the Fine Arts Center to the lab. As a working artist -- her paintings are in private collections, her videos in film libraries -- Galvis Assmus clearly knows serious artists can't be shy in a society that's often stingy toward the arts. (As a student herself in California, she once convinced Eastman Kodak to give her free film.)
Two years ago, Galvis Assmus' reputation for working successfully in both the private and academic sectors caught the attention of IET -- Interactive Entertainment Technologies, Inc. -- a young but fast-growing company producing interactive TV, websites, and other media in New York City.
With a national cry going up for more children's educational television, IET was looking to tap young minds at several universities. "UMass had a great reputation," Says IET's president Claire Mahr, "and Tricia had a reputation for her work in the field.''
While it's common practice for entertainment companies to develop ideas themselves, then get feedback from young people, IET broke with the pack in asking Galvis Assmus' students to start nearly at square-one. They backed their faith with a $500,000 grant that included furnishing the lab with equipment and software so far in use only at MIT and Yale.
In a mutually beneficial swap, students get experience working from raw concept to polished proposal -- experience they'd otherwise get only on the job. IET gets access to the ideas of people all but marinated in the reigning music, styles, fashions, and figures of speech -- people just a few years older than those the company is trying to reach.
Last spring, Galvis Assmus assembled her first multi-disciplinary team, with members ranging from freshmen to graduate students, interior designers to landscape architects. She selected people not only for their talents but on the basis of gut feelings about which personalities would work well together.
And work they did, says Galvis Assmus. Some were so fired up they stayed on all summer for no credit, designing props, characters, and sets. After months of collaboration, they had their ''pitch bible,'' or proposal for selling the show. An IET focus group came up from corporate headquarters in Manhattan; they loved what they saw, and this semester's team is building on those ideas. IET is currently in the process of selecting a co-producer, and is expecting to announce a show by early 1997, said Mahr.
Because any and all ideas produced in the lab belong to IET, students must sign a confidentiality contract promising to neither discuss the ideas that come out of their sessions nor develop those ideas on their own. But the contract also guarantees that any idea that ends up on the screen -- or as a product such as toys, CD-ROMs, games or other ''spinoffs'' -- will be compensated.
Patricia Galvis Assmus grew up in Colombia, a ''very European, beautiful country'' whose bad rap with North Americans she decries. There she attended Catholic schools which she credits for giving her a ''global view'' long before such education became standard in the U.S. She was the youngest of three children in a high-powered professional family, and the only artistic one.
"They were architects, lawyers, doctors -- all `Indian chiefs,'" laughs Galvis Assmus. "To be an artist in my family is not considered to be a real cool thing." As an undergraduate, she tried to channel her aesthetic leanings into a major in architecture. But true to her more experimental nature, she ended up in a studio art program, followed by an M.F.A. in film and video from the California Institute of the Arts.
She came to UMass immediately upon graduation in 1991, planning to spend only a year filling in for a professor on sabbatical. She immediately saw the potential for growth. The program is still small of 400 art majors, the program graduates ten or so a year -- but Galvis Assmus has had to turn away many applicants simply for lack of equipment. With the leg-up provided by partnerships like the one with IET, she believes UMass can send its film and video makers into the world superbly prepared for the fierce competition.
"There is an application for the fine arts," Galvis Assmus insists with trademark confidence. "Today's world is so electronic and so visual. The artists will be looked to, because they are the ones formulating the images."photo of Patricia Galvis-Asmus by Steve Long; computer generated image of Patricia Galvis-Assmus' work
