News and Media

Article By: Piper Hale
Published: Nov 16, 2011

Aleksandar Rodic, or Aki, grew up in Serbia, where he studied audio and video media at an engineering school. After completing his undergraduate studies there, he decided to explore digital media further with a master's degree. "SCAD was one of the only English-speaking universities I could find anywhere that had what I was looking for," Aki says.

He left Serbia and moved to Savannah, an adjustment he says he had no difficulty making. "Everyone is so friendly here that I had no trouble meeting people," says Aki. "There are people here from everywhere, so international students are not treated differently."

After dabbling in a couple of SCAD's digital media graduate programs, Aki settled on the visual effects program. "The program has a very good balance between technical and creative, which is really important," says Aki. "SCAD teaches us the latest technology we need to know, and it's very professional, very well-connected to the industry. It opens many, many doors to students, especially if they are talented and hard-working."

For Aki, these opportunities have included two internships at Electronic Arts, where he worked on the graphics for a mixed martial arts game and a college football game, and a more recent internship with Pixar. There, Aki says, "I had a responsibility that they don't usually give to interns, so I was lucky." He was working in an office with five Pixar staff designers, of whom two were SCAD alumni. The designers wanted a helicopter view of a huge city for the movie "Cars 2," but did not want to model thousands of buildings individually. Working with a technical director, Aki experimented with procedural modeling software to animate the needed scene. The cities he helped model appeared prominently on posters promoting the movie, and were featured in several scenes. Aki says that seeing his name in the credits of a major motion picture is one of the most rewarding experiences to come from any of his internships.

After he completed these internships, Aki went abroad to spend a semester at SCAD's Hong Kong campus. "Hong Kong is amazing. It's quite a different environment. It's an enormous city," says Aki. "It's vibrant and fast with lots of things going on at once. But as soon as you walk in the SCAD building, you know you are in SCAD and you feel like you're back in Savannah."

While in Hong Kong, Aki took the time to finish an experimental project he had been working on. He built a game engine from scratch to run 3-D real-time graphics on a Web browser using WebGL (technology that browsers have only recently begun supporting) and used it to create an artificial simulation of jellyfish swimming in an aquarium. He projected this interactive aquarium onto the giant windows of the SCAD Gallery in Hong Kong, lighting up the night with glowing 3-D jellyfish.

After receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback on this installation, Aki continued fine-tuning it so that it would be accessible online. During one of his working sessions, the Google Chrome browser he was using to run his simulation crashed. A few days after he sent an error report to Google that included a link to his site, Aki received an email from Google engineers raving about his work. After a short email exchange and a couple of interviews, Google offered him a temporary job with its Creative Lab to help create an interactive music video in WebGL under the direction of famed music videography visionary Chris Milk. The finished product, "3 Dreams of Black," is an immersive and surreal visual interpretation of DJ Dangermouse's musical project Rome.

Aki recently completed this project while taking classes online, and then returned to Electronic Arts, where he completed another technical internship. A still of his interactive jellyfish aquarium, Chrysoara, was chosen as the cover for the 2011-12 SCAD course catalog shortly before he presented the installation at prestigious visual effects conference SIGGRAPH. After his demonstration of the finished interactive product, representatives of several different visual effects companies approached him, some with the intention of discussing potential jobs. One of these companies, LucasArts, offered him a full-time position, which he accepted. Aki is continuing his education through SCAD eLearning while he works for LucasArts.

With graduation on the horizon, Aki's plans for the future are constantly shifting. Because the industry is evolving so rapidly, he says, "My future job probably doesn't exist at all yet." Whatever the industry may look like when Aki emerges with his M.F.A., he is excited for the challenge of working with other visual effects artists to shape this new field.

 

View Aki's portfolio.