Q: What Are You Asking For?
A: 1-2 hours of your time to meet with approximately five exceptional students who distinguished themselves by making something cool that week. You can meet for coffee. You can go to a museum, dine at the fancy place on campus, take them to a screening, spring a surprise on them, or have them over for dinner. It's entirely up to you and what would make for a memorable experience. Game designers like to play games with them, writers sometimes take them to table reads, and a cinematographer of some repute once famously cooked them a real Italian dinner in his home while talking about his very famous work. We'll transport them, pay their way, and pick up your dinner check too, usually.
Q: Am I a good candidate to be a Reward Mentor?
A: Almost assuredly! If you're working professionally in almost any aspect of entertainment, if you've got good stories to tell, if you can give an hour tour, peek behind your scenes, or just have coffee and answer questions and offer advice, your help would be much appreciated. Think about what would have blown YOUR mind as an 18 year-old freshly-arrived in Los Angeles, especially when you were anxious to get started doing what we all love. ADs, art department, sound, game production, VR, VFX, talent agency, animator, game cinematics director, producers of all walks, junior writers, showrunners, designers, critics, press - we'd love if you could spend some time with the players.
Q: What's Involved?
A: It's up to you. Unless it stresses you out, and then we can help! And it's on your schedule. We'll transport them anywhere (within reason) on your timetable. A senior gamerunner/staff member can be there if you'd like, or to help wrangle things like NDAs if that's needed. Generally, Fridays and weekends have worked out well, but we took them to a table read in the middle of the week and students were thrilled to move their schedules around.
The game runs for 15 weeks in the fall semester. We set up a Reward Experience every week for that week's standouts, starting around Labor Day Weekend and running until early December. 15 is the minimum, but we suspect we'll have room for more. We'll work with YOUR schedule most importantly.
Q: I'd love a set of those cards. I'd love to BE on one of those cards. I'd even like to design some of them.
A: Lucky you! Did we mention we're running a short crowdfunding campaign? We want to send more deserving players on more rewards, but even Uber gets expensive. We're offering all kinds of fun incentives, like your own card, a deck to play with your film school buddies, and more. Also: Unlike Kickstarter, this counts as a tax-deductible donation! Here's the link one more time:
https://ignite.usc.edu/reality