Andrew Whitacre
Update 3/16: This video was now featured on the NBC Nightly News!
Yesterday we spoke briefly with the maker of this year’s amazing Pi Day video, sophomore Loren Sherman, who described the work that went into it. For those that don’t know, MIT Admissions is emailing out its acceptances at 9:26am today, 3/14/15: 3.1415926. Sherman says CMS grad program alum and current Assistant Director of Admissions Chris Peterson approached him at the start of the semester about a video, having seen Sherman’s work for his own “Tube Hack” video.
Sherman, a 21E student (a combo of CMS and Course 6), says his passion even before MIT was to “enthrall an audience”, and here at MIT he’s leveraged his interests in filmmaking, games, and software development to make the kind of art that, in defining himself as an artist, well, indeed combines filmmaking, games, and software development.
For the making of the video itself, he says that when Peterson approached him in the early fall, he immediately went to work shooting the needed shots of campus and collecting stock footage. Only toward the end of the semester, as everything came together, did he work to shoot scenes with Dean of Admissions Stuart Schmill. Most of Sherman’s time, he says, went into modeling and animating the drones, made in the open-source animation package Blender. The other heavy lift was syncing the animation and cuts with “The Ride of the Valkyries”.
Want to offer Loren your own kudos? Hit up the comments section in the video’s MIT Admissions post!
