Senior Gets Animated about the Infinite Connection

MIT’s Class of 2013 should find it useful next month as they earn their official listing in it, and the thousands of alumni who haven’t yet logged in to the Infinite Connection should check it out as well. You know who you are.

Lin didn’t just make the video for the $300 gift card prize offering in the MIT Alumni Association contest. An avid designer, Lin enjoys fooling with film technologies and says he made this video on the night before deadline.

“I saw the listing and figured I had a shot,” he said. “And I thought, ‘what better way to do this quickly than with animation?’ I grabbed a Wacom tablet, which you can hook to your laptop and use for drawing by hand. I used QuickTime screen capturing.”

A big fan of RSA Animate, Lin designed the directory tutorial with its instructional, straightforward style in mind, telling the story of a login through clever animated slides.

“I hadn’t really done something like it before and wanted to see how it would work out,” he recalled.

Whether experimenting with live-action or animation, Lin enjoys storytelling. His short documentary on the MIT lightweight crew team and his moving profile of Emma Nelson ’14 demonstrate his attention to a film’s narrative arc.

Though Lin is a course 4 (architecture) major, he has enjoyed Professor Vivek Bald’s documentary filmmaking course and Angel Nevarez’s intro to video class. In the latter, Lin directed A Proper Meal, which won the undergraduate CMS Media Spectacle Award last year.

Lin has also been active in the Asian American Association and the DynaMIT engineering camp, where he mentors middle school-aged students in math and science.

Whether Lin pursues film or architecture or design or none of the above, he clearly knows how to use the alumni directory for reaching out to fellow beavers. During IAP in 2011, he interned at the Brand Union in New York, working under its North American CEO Robert Scalea ’77, an experience he chronicled on Slice.