Digital Design Commons Productions Cultivates Student Creativity

At the edge of campus’s concrete jungle, better known as the Center for the Arts (CFA), stands 301 High Street, an antiquated house ornamented in a shamelessly neoclassical style. A Greco-Roman marble statue is painted onto the building’s pale yellow façade, centered above the Tuscan-style porch. Within this visual time capsule, however, is a student organization leveraging state-of-the-art technology to bring students’ creative visions to life. Digital Design Commons (DDC) Productions, an association of digital creators, aims to provide students with a hands-on workshop and a professional network that connects them to paid opportunities in the field. 

“My favorite part of the DDC is honestly the physical space. A physical space can really inspire creativity,” DDC Managing Producer Theo Baldwin Edwards ’27 said in an interview with The Argus. “Anyone can walk through that door and ask, ‘What’s going on? Can I get involved in anything?’”

DDC Productions, the DDC, and the Digital Design Studio (DDS) are closely interlinked and understandably easy to mistake for one another. DDC Productions Student Managing Producer Tanahirí Torres González ’27 described encountering this confusion. 

“One of the challenges [of growing the organization] was definitely letting people know, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re not the DDS. We’re different…. We’re DDC Productions, and you can work with us,’” González said.

Within the DDC building, just beyond its warmly lit, creaking spiral staircase, lies the beating heart of the Digital Design Commons: a recording studio, editing rooms, and a motion capture lab.

DDC Productions gathers job opportunities in videography, photography, sound design, motion capture, and related fields, and student-managing producers such as González and Edwards share them with students. 

DDC Productions also hosts events where student producers meet with established industry directors.

“We did an event with RaMell Ross, who is the director of the Oscar-nominated film ‘Nickel Boys’ (2024),” González said. “We got to screen ‘Nickel Boys,’ and he came in and did a talk with students, which was awesome…. And then this past fall, we did an event with [Jake Schreier], who directed a bunch of really amazing music videos for artists like Kendrick Lamar and Selena Gomez.” 

The group is also interested in contributing directly to Wesleyan’s community. This work includes helping film majors produce their senior theses and using motion capture to animate characters in projects by student artists and game developers.

“We have these [motion capture] suits that people put on,” González said. “If you have seen pictures of [them] on big film sets, they have the white dots all over their bodies. So basically, we have sensors in the motion capture studio that capture the movement of those little dots; it captures the movement of the subject, and then that movement can then be put on a 3D character.” 

DDC Productions’ student leaders feel the difficulty of simultaneously working toward several goals. 

“[The students are] all excited to get involved in all these different projects. It’s just a challenge of being a student, balancing the creative projects with the academic ones,” Edwards said. 

One of DDC Productions’ goals is to help students deepen and expand their professional visual media portfolios while working in paid positions. Students applying to work at the DDC must submit a portfolio; however, previous experience is not a requirement. Student portfolios take many shapes, and no two projects are the same. 

“We never want that component of the application to be a barrier to entry,” González said. “What we look for in [applicant portfolios] is, ‘What is this person interested in? What are they working hard on? What are they good at right now?’”

For DDC Productions, bringing in students with unique interests is invaluable. 

“We need different types of artists for this to run well, so we definitely look for that variety in skill sets, for people who are responsible and committed,” González said. “I would say the biggest part of it is just [finding] people that are passionate [about] creating cool things.”

This semester, DDC Productions will continue its collaboration with the CFA to document the Artists-in-Residence program, as well as a long-term project that involves photographing every music ensemble in the University’s Music Department. The group publishes updates on these projects, previous work, and upcoming events on their website.

Oscar Chen can be reached at ochen@wesleyan.edu. 

Claire Farina can be reached at cfarina@wesleyan.edu