Tag Archives: Frido Beisert

Die-cut with a vengeance: Student repurposing project captured in new video

The boxes and boxes of leftover die-cut letters that returned from the printer along with the 2015-2016 Viewbook, sparked an idea in Product Design faculty member, Frido Beisert. While others may have seen those letters as useless refuse bound for the recycling bin, Frido saw an opportunity to push the creative bounds of his students. As the saying goes, one person’s trash is another’s design challenge.

Frido asked his students one simple question when he presented them with these letters: How can you transform something useless into something useful?

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Production Designer, alum Patrick Hanenberger behind ‘Rise of the Guardians’ look and feel

Even if you’ve missed all the great stories in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, you’ve no doubt heard that DreamWorks Animation’s latest film Rise of the Guardians—which takes childhood fantasy figures like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and reimagines them as mythological heroes in an epic fantasy adventure—comes out in theaters Wednesday, Nov. 21.

And right in the middle of all that legendary action is the film’s production designer, Art Center’s own Patrick Hanenberger, who graduated from the College in 2003 with a degree in Transportation Design and is currently teaching a Visual Communication course.

We recently caught up with Hanenberger to ask him about his role in Guardians, how he ended up working in animation and which lessons from Art Center have stuck with him.

Dotted Line: First of all, how did you go from being a Transportation Design student to a production designer for animated films?

Patrick Hanenberger: I studied Transportation Design at Art Center and it taught me problem solving, 3D modeling, sculpting, sketching, designing around the human figure, rendering, research and most importantly presentation. These are all skills I use on a daily basis and are universal in any kind of design field. I always knew I wanted to work in movies and animated movies are great for designers since every single little detail needs to be designed and modeled. During Art Center I developed my portfolio to be very content based, which meant I always designed my vehicles for a specific story. After graduation I got a job as a visual development artist and from there on over the last eight years worked my way up to become production designer.

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Alumnus Fridolin Beisert Talks Art Center

Product Design alum and Associate Professor Fridolin Beisert is a practicing design professional who also conducts workshops and lectures for global corporations and executive education institutions. His classes at Art Center focus on creative problem solving, design thinking methodologies, cross-disciplinary team projects and sustainable design strategies. Previously, he developed games in Tokyo for Sony, formed an international concept design consultancy, played worldwide as an underground DJ, authored a book on learning design using 3D software and studied traditional papermaking in Japan. Suffice it to say that Beisert is a pretty interesting (and busy!) guy.

In the video below, Beisert discusses his time at Art Center and some of the lessons he learned here: