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Alumni

Alex Blanes

Blanes_headshot.png

Alex is a young poet, mythologist and game designer harbouring unrepentant delight in the process and products of digital creativity. Having recently graduated with distinction as a double major in Liberal Studies and Digital Media Studies, Alex blends the former's mature intellectual curiosity with the latter's project-based collaborative creativity, in order to build meaningful, beautiful, simple, and user-focused experiences.

Alex decided to attend the MDM program at the same time he realized heroes were made, not born. His decision came subsequent to the time he spent as Creative Director of an experimental four-month game development class in 2012, where he learned how to delegate and manage a 14-person design team, how to make concrete design decisions, how to pitch ideas and perhaps most simply, how to collaborate efficiently and compassionately over long periods of time.

Raised in an alternative school on rural Salt Spring Island, Alex is committed to instilling his creative digital process and products with the felt perception of wilderness, history, and wonder. With five years of experience working in the non-profit sector, and as the previous president of Vancouver Island University's (VIU) Liberal Studies Club, Alex's status as insatiable philomath, public speaker and civic proponent is balanced only by his quest to become, and understand what it means to be, fully human.

His primary goal at the CDM is to build and present the things which he is afraid he can't, to learn the things he is afraid he can't, and to have his expectations carefuly stolen from him in a most delicious way.

Aside from programming simple iOS games, designing web interfaces, or composing GDDs, you will find him writing awkwardly heartfelt poems, listening to any music which induces frisson, and extoling the virtues of his favourite authors, directors, designers and composers to anyone who will listen.

His secret wish is to become the hero he reads about in books.

Projects

Dec 2014 (Cohort 8)