A group of digital arts students from Singapore have developed a 30-second animated commercial that visually depicts the city of Redmond’s 100 years of growth and development.
The commercial is a result of a partnership between DigiPen Institute of Technology and the One Redmond Initiative to celebrate the City of Redmond’s future vision, spirit of creativity and innovation in developing public-private partnerships.
The 30-second video entitled “Redmond, Grow With Us” uses animation created by a team of 11 fourth-year students from DigiPen’s Singapore campus during a three-week stay in Redmond.The commercial was launched at the Redmond City Council meeting.
The students involved in this project include Claire Au, Elizabeth Huang, Amanda Seah, Tio Lok Ling, Chong Kwok Beng, Kelwin Kwan, Lam Chun On, Christopher Nonis, Jay Phua, Tang Hongxiang, and Darren Tiew.
Talking to Animationxpress.com about his experience working on the commercial Raymond Yan- senior vice president for DigiPen Institite of Technology, Singapore said “With Redmond celebrating its centennial this year and with the efforts of One Redmond, we felt this would be a very interesting challenge to have our students from Singapore understand and visualize the core essence of what Redmond is both today and in the future.”
“We approached the city of Redmond about 1 month before the students from Singapore were scheduled to arrive. We discussed the idea of having students work on an animation for the city but the specific project was to be defined by the students once they arrived. Once the students arrived from Singapore, we had them meet with people from the Redmond City Hall. The city arranged to take the students on a full tour of the city and then over a period of two weeks, the students developed a number of ideas for the animation. These ideas were presented to city officials over several meetings until the final concept was approved.”
“The actual concept for the animation was developed over the first two weeks of the four week schedule, which started the week of May 14th and would run through June 8th.” he added
“It was an interesting experience working on the commercial, this is the centennial for the city of Redmond and they really wanted to have an animation that helped communicate the future of Redmond. Having students from Singapore involved presented an interesting opportunity as they had never been to Redmond so they were able to visualize the project in an unique way with their fresh eyes.”
“The students have a done a lot of hard work on this commercial ,we have used pop-up images of evergreens and high-rise buildings to captures the town’s evolution from an early fishing settlement to high-tech industry hub.Redmond were easy to work with, One Redmond really provided us with a lot of input and I can say that they were very pleased with the final animation and We hope that the people of Redmond too like it.”
“It’s an interesting time for the city of Redmond. With companies like Microsoft and Nintendo based here, it has certainly become a center for innovation and technology. That said, the city has also done a very good job maintaining the natural setting that makes the environment attractive for the many employees of the technology companies. I hope moving forward, the city will continue to work hard to strike a good balance between growth and maintaining the natural environment.” shared Raymond.
Elaborating more on the 100 years of Redmond, John Marchione – Mayor of Redmond said “It is the 100th year of the city of Redmond and we really wanted to make it special, We are very excited to be able to partner with DigiPen on this promotional video which will become a major component of One Redmond’s business development initiative.Redmond is growing fast and we really wanted to show to the people how it has grown in these 100 years.”
“The Digipen students captured the vision of Redmond as a vibrant, high tech and diverse community, they were a joy to work with.It has been a great experience working on the video with Digipen, we are really happy with the final output and I hope people really like it .It’s worth watching in slow motion if you can because there are a lot of cool things in the background” he concludes.
Digipen Institute of Technology, Singapore was started in 2008 providing undergraduate courses in the field of game design, digital art and animation.