TAMK Partner in World Summit Youth Award

The World Summit Youth Award (WSYA) is a contest for youth-led online projects supporting the implementation of the UN Millennium Goals.

WSYA is arranged by the World Summit Award Network which operates in 168 countries in cooperation with UNESCO, UNIDO, Internet Society and other international organisations.

Everybody under 30 can participate in this contest with five categories:

1. Fight Poverty, Hunger and Disease !
2. Education for all !
3. Power 2 Women !
4. Create your Culture !
5. Go Green !

Deadline for submissions is February 28. Three winners in each category will be given the opportunity to showcase their platform to heads of state, business leaders and civil society at the World Summit Award (WSA) Gala and Winners Conference in June, 2009 in Monterrey, Mexico.

The organiser of WSYA activities in Finland is TAMK University of Applied Sciences School of Art and Media.

UN Millennium Goals
World Summit Youth Award
World Summit Award

Maria Kaurismäki's Sideline: Trailer online

Sideline (Sivutyö) is strong and topical story about a female student that drifts to be a prostitute. It’s a 13 minute short fiction movie, shot on 16mm film. The movie is a production of TAMK School of Art and Media, written and directed by Maria Kaurismäki. Sideline is the graduation work for Maria Kaurismäki, Emilia Howells, Jouko Piipponen, Jussi Lindgren and Johanna Harmaala.

Sideline has been screened at Tampere Art Factory and Kettupäivät Film Festival.

The trailer, the first minute of the film is now available.

See the trailer and read more at Sideline Website

Photo: Ville Salminen

Score's New Website Finished!

Score, the game development club operating under TAMK's student union and from Finlayson, has recently published their new website. The visual design has been revised and the content has been updated. The site also states that there will be more sections in the near future. The site is run with the help of WordPress, the free, open-source content management system.

Juho Hartikainen
Score President

View the site
Earlier stories about Score

Want to Study Digital Media in English? Apply now!

Is your plan to be in the position of Animator, Art Director, Concept Designer, Game Artist, Graphic Designer, Project Manager, Producer, UI Designer, Web Designer or Web Programmer?

The new BA Degree Programme in Media at TAMK School of Art and Media in Tampere focuses on interactive media content design and production. The students learn about current digital media issues and gain deep insight into one of the three specialisation options: visual design, interaction design or project management.

The areas of application include web design and services, games, mobile media, multimedia, social media, cross media and interactive installations.

Applying to programmes conducted in English at Finnish universities of applied sciences (UAS) takes place through a System of Joint Application (Yhteishaku in Finnish). Prospective students can apply to four different degree programmes at UAS using the same application form.

The application period for studies starting in August 2009 started last Monday, and will close on Friday February 13th 2009, 4:15 PM Finnish time (+2 GMT).

Applicants to TAMK Media programme also need to return the pretask to TAMK by February 13th.

The best applicants for media are invited to the entrance exam April 21st.

The Joint Application period for UAS study programmes taught in Finnish or Swedish is March 23 - April 9. TAMK School of Art and Media will welcome applications to two BA Degree Programmes in Finnish, the Fine Arts Programme and the Film and Television Programme.

Degree Programme in Media
Photo: The café and library at the School of Art and Media

The New Exchange Students Have Arrived

TAMK University of Applied Sciences is international. There are 175 degree students from 45 countries studying at TAMK. Next year there will be more, as the new Degree Programme in Media taught in English will start.

Also the exchange students coming from the 160 international partner universities add to the international atmosphere. Last week 70 exchange students from 20 countries started their studies with the orientation studies, this week they already participate in classes in our degree programmes.

Photo: A group of the new exchange students who study at TAMK main campus made an excursion to the Finlayson campus in the city center, and learned about the TAMK School of Art and Media and the ProAcademy. The tour ended at the roof garden.

Colin Muir, Mr. MA in Screenwriting

Colin Muir, Programme Leader of MA in Screenwriting - the Salford University and TAMK joint programme, is a frequent visitor at TAMK School of Art and Media.

The MA in Screenwriting works half time in Tampere, half time in Manchester, UK. Colin just spent a week in Tampere, meeting the students and discussing the further development of the programme.

The students of the first MA in Screenwriting group are graduating in January 2010, and the second group started in September.

Colin says that this programme differs in some ways from the ordinary programmes arranged in one university only. There is a better balance between the creative possibilities of the individual and the common interests of the film industry.

Another difference is that we are maintaining the relation to students after they graduate, Colin points out. We assist the students with the best scripts to Cannes, Berlin Film Festival and even to the American film market in Los Angeles.

The results seem good. Studying in a new place gives time and space to the students, a chance to see the world in new ways - this helps to be creative.

Colin tells that in the future students will not be recruited in Finland and UK only, there are discussions to extend the activity to Germany and Austria, even USA.

Colin was born in Edinburgh. He has an MFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Connecticut and an MFA in Film and Television Directing from Temple University in Philadelphia. He worked in USA as a director, producer and scriptwriter. Since 1991 he has been teaching at the University of Salford. He is Programme leader for the MA in Television and Radio Scriptwriting and the MA in Film Screenwriting. He is also a director of the Film Production Company.

Master of Art in Screenwriting
All stories about MA in Scriptwriting in this blog

Photo: Colin Muir at the roof garden of the School of Art and Media

Postcard from California College of the Arts

On November, I, Riku Itäpuro from TAMK's Computing Centre, made a trip to California, USA on a combined conference and staff exchange program.
There was at first USENIX LISA Conference in San Diego, which collects together yearly some 1000 (mainly unix) sysadmins around the globe for a week. My second week I spend in San Francisco where I had opportunity to visit colleagues from three different Universities and Colleges: California College of the Arts (CCA), Stanford University and University of California Berkeley.

CCA reminds me a lot of TTVO at here TAMK. CCA has two campuses, one in San Francisco City and the one I visited in Oakland. The distance between those two is 20 minutes with BART-train. They also have dedicated campusbus for students that makes door-to-door trips between campuses. Academic programs have both undergraduate(20) and graduate(7) degrees and include animation, architecture, photography and design only to mention few. CCA has 1660 students, 400 faculty, exchange program and summer studies for international students.

I was happy to meet shortly Peter Hendricks, director of international students programs on international luncheon. The least I could do was shake hands, talk a bit about our exchange programs and exchange visit cards in hope to touch base later regarding relationships between TAMK and CCA. If somebody wants to study Art in California, maybe that could be possible after few years.

My interest in CCA was more exchanging knowledge with people who keep IT (Information Technology, not the pronoun) running. It was very nice to talk about issues that keep us busy, whether we work on San Francisco or Tampere. These issues are universal and there exists different ways to handle them, some ways sound better than we use to do. For good thing I also noticed, that we are not hopeless behind common colleges and universities regarding centralization of services and identity management where I think we are now ahead of our american cousins. Or terrible late, because centralization-decentralization cycle tends to be some 15 years and we might as well be one lap behind.

I leave techie details from this art blog entry away, but if you are interested hearing them you are welcome to join my yearly travel presentation later this year at Computing Centre. Just mail me beforehand so I can reserve enough tea and coffee mugs.

Here are some photos from CCA's Oakland Campus, where I was hosted by John "Rowan" Littell, who also was conducting workshops on LISA week earlier. Other persons on pics are me, Mik Gaspay and Patrick Lee


Links:
http://www.cca.edu/academics/
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa08/