The contest was very close this year, with Webster University's team The Fauxtons ultimately winning the competition. The Fauxtons team of Josh Murphy, Natali Arco and Jon Ontiveros competed against The HOG Hushers from Carnegie Mellon University and Los Monos de Muerte from Southern Methodist University in the second annual contest. This year's First Prize included a Hog 4 console, a scholarship and a personal internship at High End Systems.
Once again, the contest was judged by a panel of lighting industry veterans; this year Jason Cain, Vickie Claiborne, Marc Lorenz and Patrick Dierson lent their expertise to the competition. Claiborne comments, "First off, all of the teams showed passion, talent and creativity. While watching this year's contest, I was struck by how each team showed great attention to timing, design and overall visual impact.
"These contests are highly subjective, and often times when it's as close as it was this year, the decision as to which team wins is based on factors like use of gobos, color, features of the fixtures themselves, variety in positions, and movement, as well as programming skills on the console. Overall, each team performed well and deserve to be proud."
Webster's Josh Murphy says, "Hog Factor is a fantastic opportunity that High End Systems provides for students. In my experience, students don't often have the opportunity to transfer a project from 3D visualization to a real rig, and that's an important part of how professionals work in our industry, so it's a great process to experience. It also gives students a much larger scale project than we would normally have to work on, and with a wider range of equipment.
"This project really pushed us to be as creative as possible and test how we work together in a higher pressure situation. We are very grateful to have Seth Jackson as our professor and as head of our Concert Programme. The way he runs our program plays a large part in us each having the confidence to go after this project. It was an honor to go up against two excellent teams in the final round, and I think each team did a great job."
Jon Ontiveros explains, "Natali and I are theatrical lighting designers, so switching gears to think in a more 'concert' manner was a fun challenge. From the start I knew I wanted to be the programmer for this competition; I have not had much work in 3D visualizers, however working with Light Converse and these two phases has been a really great learning experience.
"This competition is an incredible opportunity for anyone to be able to take their designs in the 3D visualizer and bring them to real life. It was invaluable to be able to learn from Seth Jackson, someone who actually is in the real concert world and does this every day. It has also been a pleasure to build a relationship with High End Systems, and to have such a big company bring their equipment to the educational industry."
In closing, Natalie Arco comments, "We all are very thankful for the opportunity High End Systems provided allowing young designers to showcase their work. As students we rarely are provided with the opportunity to work in a global platform like LDI and the experience was unbeatable. Our design flow was a fun one. Jon, Josh and I are all great friends but even closer now after being locked in a tiny room programming together for endless hours. I wouldn't have wanted to work on this project with anyone else, that's for sure!"
(Jim Evans)
