Category: ABOUT

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With over 30 years of experience in the entertainment industry and more than 11 years at Full Sail University, Digital Cinematography Course Director Christopher C. Odom has had a wide range of experience in the business, and he’s still finding new ways to prosper creatively and professionally in an ever-evolving digital world.

“As an undergraduate, I originally went to [historically black college] Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia,” Christopher says. He later completed his bachelor’s degree at Georgia State University and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Television from the University of California. Currently, Christopher is working towards receiving his doctorate this year in Texts and Technology, Digital Media from the University of Central Florida.

“[Texts, and Technology, Digital Media is] a school of thought very similar to digital humanities, which looks at the humanities either with digital tools or the digital aspects of emerging technologies and humanities with the goal of solving problems in the areas of social justice and social change,” he explains. “I was interested in social media and I kind of tacked that on to the visual imagery of social movements.

To recognize graduate students for their strides in research, the College of Graduate Studies Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC) has put together a new award. The Award for Excellence by a Graduate Student Researcher celebrates UCF’s outstanding graduate students for their impressive research and creative scholarship within their fields. The self-nominated award encourages students to share their research with the UCF community and allows the GSAC to acknowledge and reward exceptional students.

Fellow council member Christopher Odom, a Ph.D. candidate in the texts and technology program, says the GSAC is “laser-focused” on supporting the needs of graduate students.

“Both the Graduate Award of Excellence by a Student Researcher and the Graduate Student Advisory Council are important because, at a university with a student population comprised mostly of undergraduate students, the council and the award offer a way to meaningfully impact, recognize, and support the work and the needs of graduate students,” he says.

Odom also describes the award as beneficial in helping boost students’ resumes and leaving behind a legacy to build upon for future Graduate Student Advisory Councils. He notes that the council is only just getting started and aims to create more opportunities such as this.

“You will see more support from the Graduate Student Advisory Council for graduate students, graduate teaching assistants, and graduate assistants in the future,” he says.

This social justice and social change interactivity presentation is an interactive audiovisual rhetorical argument for #BlackLivesMatter that employs digital media elements of both generative and participatory culture art. If only we could walk a single day in another person’s shoes… We are all the sum of each of our own unique experiences and reality is a perception based upon one’s vantage point within one’s immediate cultural narratives and awareness of the context. Just because you may not have personally killed anyone, does not mean killers do not exist. By the same token, stereotypes, hegemonic marginalizing tropes, systemic racism, and systemic injustice exist, whether or not you are an active participant, unwilling beneficiary, or injustice-denier. Systemic racism and injustice are pervasive and permeate throughout society. This social justice and social change interactive experience is designed as an educational learning tool and a visual rhetorical argument for the #BlackLivesMatter social movement.