School of Design & Arts : Multimedia Arts

History of Multimedia Arts Program

The Multimedia arts program had its humble beginning with an initial warm body count of only seven students in the Degree it has swelled into over a thousand. The support of Dean Rosemarie Bautista to the endeavor was instrumental to the MMA’s current success

The initial course was supposed to be in Graphics Design and offered under the Computer Application program. With the advancement of computer technologies and software application.

Program Description

The Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Arts, the first and only degree program of its kind in the Country, is an attempt to prepare young Filipinos for the multimedia revolution and for life in the information-rich environment of the future. The course combines new areas such as digital media and the Internet with core skills such as programming, communications and graphic design to provide a multi-disciplinary undergraduate program which meets the requirements of 21ST century computing.

Objectives and Goals

The program seeks to prepare students for a changing workplace where the combined media of text, graphics, speech, sounds, and images are being used more and more in the creation and transmission of information. This curriculum prepares students for professional positions in which this technology is currently utilized.

The AB Multimedia Arts program is committed to the following goals:

To link traditional art and design concepts with new multimedia technology;
To provide students with the opportunity to develop hands-on production skills in the multi-media arts, and to achieve aesthetic and technical proficiency;
To provide students with state-of-the-art hardware and software with which to experiment, thus enabling them to become proficient in the multimedia technology;
To provide students with opportunities to challenge conventional communication methods and, using multimedia, to approach creatively the dissemination of visual information in ways which are well conceived, communicative, interactive, responsible, comprehensive and user-friendly; and
To encourage students to view their multimedia specialization in the context of other fields of study, thus enabling them to understand the impact of the multimedia arts on society and thereby apply their professional competencies with humanistic understanding and concern.
Facilities and Resources
The College of Saint Benilde has a decade-long history of providing very high quality education in computer-aided design. It possesses some of the best educational CAD and multimedia facilities for design students in the Philippines.

The resources that currently support our Multimedia Arts program include:

Dedicated faculty members who are practitioners, consultants or successful professionals in their specialties;
Laboratories with Pentium-level computers all connected to the Internet and equipped with a wide variety of peripherals including those for image scanning, color printing, CDROM writing, and digital audio-video recording and editing;
A rich software platform for multimedia application development, including the latest paint, photo re-touching, CAD, animation, interactive, electronic pre-press, and internet-access software; and
A Learning Resource Center with an excellent collection to support the needs of the multimedia arts curriculum.

Job Opportunities

Tremendous opportunities abound for AB Multimedia Arts graduates. Although there are no limits to where a multimedia degree can take you, multimedia has firmly established itself in film, TV and video production, electronic graphics and advertising, publication of literature and CD-ROM software, education, internet-based communication and business and interactive games and entertainment industries.

Since the multimedia industry in the Philippines is still in its infancy, its possibilities are yet to be discovered. The Benildean graduate of this program will have the opportunity to shape and define its future.

Abroad, multimedia graduates have a very high take-up into relevant employment. Currently they are mainly placed in the following three types of organizations:

specialist interaction design and multimedia companies;
multimedia departments of book publishers; and
multimedia departments of television companies.

Locally, there is an increasing national demand for well-qualified multimedia specialists. Graduates of our course will emerge with an understanding of the processes involved in Multimedia Arts, including design, production and publishing, leading to a future in careers such as:

Advertising
CD-ROM publishing
Computer-Aided Design, Modeling, Rendering
Computer Animation
Design of computer-based multimedia forms
Design of interactive games and entertainment forms
Design of interactive presentations
Design of interactive virtual reality environments
Design for human-computer interaction
Multimedia education and training
Electronic layout and pre-press for graphic design and print media publishing
Illustration and visualization
Web production and management

Program Content & Structure

The AB Multimedia Arts program is structured and intensively taught, while at the same time being informal and project-based. Students are encouraged to be both realistic and experimental.

The AB Multimedia Arts course mirrors real world conditions by emphasizing teamwork and production—oriented goals. This strategy enables the student to acquire the skills needed to adapt quickly to actual working environments, a valuable asset for any profession.

During the foundation year, the student develops a conceptual and practical foundation in multimedia through coursework and hands-on workshops, and enriches his technical skills through individual minor multimedia projects. Teamwork is encouraged through activities that allow students to work in small groups creating specialist multimedia productions that integrate interactive text, graphics, images, animation and sound.

Two summer sessions are spent on full-time practicums off-campus, allowing the student to apply learned computing skills as interns within a commercial organization. This industrial training gives the student a fresh insight into his academic work, and makes it easier for him to find a career after graduation.

This learning format enables individual creativity to flourish within a framework of cooperation, encouraging students to exchange expertise and to build projects in a multi-disciplinary way, a structure that reflects the nature of industrial practice. Major projects must meet the standards of the faculty as well as of multimedia industry experts.

Benefits

Students in CSB’s AB Multimedia Arts program enjoy a number of benefits, including a small student-teacher ratio, a dedicated faculty, summer internships and access to professional-quality multimedia production facilities on-campus. These facilities are well equipped and maintained with the latest technology.