Visit the Creative Canvas Expo — held at Mt. Sierra College in Monrovia, Calif., 1-7 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 27 — and you’ll find yourself in an ocean of Macs and Apple products. The college’s Multimedia Design Technology Department and the event itself — a showcase for work in graphics, digital graphics and Web design — are powered by Macs.
“All students are required to have PowerBooks as part of the curriculum,” Kimo Oades, department chair, Multimedia Design Technology, told MacCentral. “They come in with 15-inch or 17-inch laptops. We have a computer lab with 34 Power Mac G4s, which we’ll be replacing with 2GHz dual processor G5s.”
At the Creative Canvas Expo, Mt. Sierra students will demonstrate applications of 3-D animation, motion graphics, digital graphics, Web design and music in a gallery of their work. They used such software as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Director in their projects. 3D graphics and 3D animations were produced with Maya 5. What’s more, the students attracted many of the event’s sponsors with a presentation they presented with Apple’s Keynote application, Oades said.
All of the video produced for the Creative Canvas Expo was done on Final Cut Pro 4; DVD Studio Pro 2 was used to master the DVDs and create menu graphics and Weblinks. Mt. Sierra students start using iDVD in their first quarter, then graduate to the more sophisticated DVD Studio Pro.
Apple is one of the main sponsors of Creative Canvas Expo. The company is sponsoring a live music area, at which it will also showcase the iTunes Music Store and its Soundtrack application. Apple will also be elsewhere on campus, demonstrating most of their hardware and software products.
“Apple has been very supportive of our school,” Oades said. “Students work directly with Apple, and the company helps them pick and choose the right laptop. Apple representatives also come to campus on orientation days and work with students to make sure they know how to maintain and care for their PowerBooks.”
Saturday will be the day of the first, but not last, Creative Canvas Expo. Spring 2004 has already been earmarked for the next one.