On April 28, Bradley’s Department of Interactive Media will host its annual FUSE exhibition where students in the department can show off the work they’ve spent countless hours creating.
Working together with the Peoria Riverfront Museum, FUSE aims to showcase different mediums of work, including video games, apps, animation artwork and more.
Ethan Ham, chairman of the department, said in its fifth year, FUSE will have the same setup as previous years. However, the games change each time.
“Every year is different because the projects are different,” Ham said. “I don’t want to pick favorites, but there is some interesting stuff. We have a virtual reality game, which is very cool. We have a game that is voice-controlled; it’s on Alexa, which is pretty neat. I like the arcade game this year … There’s a touch-table game.”
While collaborating with the Riverfront Museum, the students involved are able to reach a wider audience while also getting off campus. According to Ham, this is the reason the event is hosted at the museum.
“What [the museum does] is make it a free day, and lots of people come,” Ham said. “Some of them come to see us and some just because it’s a free day, but they’re pleasantly surprised.”
Despite being made by students, Ham said FUSE is not necessarily geared for students on campus.
“What we tell our students is that the target audience is fifth graders,” Ham said. “We do a much bigger push toward the community, [and] we put out word to public schools.”
On the student side, Brie Kastner, executive producer for FUSE, said helping run the exhibition gave her a chance to experience a more professional side of her major year after year. According to Kastner, her professional growth through FUSE makes the hard work leading up to the end result worth it.
“Remembering how it felt last year, and then just getting to see all the small components … They just all come together in this one really cool day where everyone gets to see these projects that so many of the students put hard work into,” Kastner, a junior animation major, said.
Before she came to Bradley, Kastner said she attended FUSE as a community member.
“I heard about [FUSE] before I was even enrolled at Bradley,” Kastner said. “I had gone to the show before my freshman year, and I went and checked it out. That made me fall more in love with the department even more.”
But for others, the experience is a step into the unknown. Freshman animation major Ruby Brown will experience FUSE for the first time with her group’s game “Scrapyard Skirmish.”
“I am nervous, I’d say,” Brown said. “[I’m excited about] getting to show the work off like what we put all that work into, and it’ll be fun to show the kids.”
Before coming to Bradley, Brown said she didn’t have experience in her major, but she has since grown.
“This is the first time I’ve ever owned a computer, so [becoming an animation major] was quite the leap,” Brown said. “I’ve gotten the hang of it since, though.”
Brown’s enthusiasm for her major serve as an example of why Kastner said the anticipation for the exhibition is well warranted within the interactive media department.
“I think that something really unique about our department [is that] we all are really excited about what we create,” Kastner said. “We’re making animations and video games. People dream about doing that stuff, so it’s never really hard to be excited about making these games. It’s very tedious. It’s a lot of hard work … but I feel like we’re all just so excited about our craft that we keep going.”
FUSE will be run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 28 at the Peoria Riverfront Museum at 222 SW Washington St. For more information, visit https://bradleyinteractive.com/exhibits.
