In her commencement speech seven years ago, Penny Stamps asked the newest Stamps School of Art & Design graduates “What’s your big idea?” Earlier this month, the Stamps community announced Maddie Vassalo and Miles Hionis as the 2025 winners of the Big Idea Award, the 5th annual award given in Penny Stamps’ honor.
The amount of $25,000 is given to a graduating Stamps student, to help fund a major project, or “Big Idea”, after graduation. The award winning graduating senior, Vassalo, together with junior Hionis, won based on their Big Idea: “Naming all the Flowers I Could”, a multidisciplinary production company that looks to support queer and female creators.
“Naming All the Flowers I Could” began as an idea for a project which brought Vassalo and Hionis together. “[For the project, a group of us were looking for a stage manager], so we were like, hey Miles, you’re a freshman, do you want to stage manage for us?” Vassalo said during an interview. From that moment in 2023, Vassalo and Hionis’ production company began.
Hionis and Vassalo during downtime while adjusting the virtual background.
“Naming All the Flowers I Could” has two projects to date: “Iphis and Ianthe”, a contemporary retelling of the Greek myth; and “When We Break, We Breathe”, an interactive, choose your own adventure film intermixed with a retro inspired third-person adventure game.
Vassalo and Hionis are the second out of the five Big Idea winners to partner with the Digital Media Commons, or the DMC, located in the Duderstadt Center. Perhaps one reason for the success of a DMC partnership is the abundant resources available. Vassalo lists the virtual production and the ability to have high quality documentation of work, as two positive attributes of the Video Studio within the Duderstadt Center.
“We had done a devised theater piece in the Newman, but we were really interested in the way that the Video Studio can give you really nice documentation,” Vassalo said. “We were able to work with the studio staff to capture high quality audio and video, allowing for a good collaboration [as well].”
The DMC also has other valuable resources: its people.
“We have a lot of collaborators that contribute really heavily,” Vassalo said. “The game we just filmed, I think the team was around 20 or 25 people, from set, design, post production, and production assistance.” Though these numbers might be slightly higher than average, as “Naming All the Flowers I Could” is totally based on collaboration. “We want people to be able to have as big a stake in the process as they want to have.” Vassalo said.
In fact, internal DMC collaboration between the Video Studio and the Virtual Reality (VR) Visualization Studio allowed Vassalo and Hionis to use virtual production for two out of three of their films.
Dari Eskandari, a DMC mentor to Vassalo, explains the impact of virtual production. “Virtual production is a cutting-edge technique that attaches a VR tracking accessory to the recording camera, so the projected digital set can move to reflect the camera’s perspective in real time,” they said. “Because the digital set environment is streamed from Unreal Engine [a 3D graphic game engine], cast and crew could make collaborative changes to colors, lighting, and other details that otherwise would have been relegated to a lengthy post-production process.”
“For example,” Eskandari continued, “the Visualization Studio team even used artificial intelligence to digitize and expand the repeating texture [Hionis] painted on the physical stage so that it continued seamlessly into the virtual production’s Unreal background.” Within the DMC, collaboration of teams, resources, and people promoted a more streamlined and faster project.
One of the other great attractions to the resources within DMC: they are free, and available to all students.
“The Video Studio, as a free resource, is able to host a lot of experimental work in the way that other theaters on campus cannot, due to cost barriers,” Vassalo said. “I think one of the amazing things about being at Michigan is that there are many resources for you to figure out something you’re even just vaguely interested in. There are always people available to help you figure things out.”
Congratulations to Maddie Vassalo and Miles Hionis for winning the 2025 Big Idea Award! In the words of Penny Stamps, “You have your artistic skills; now develop your ideas, your big idea. Imagination has no limits.”
The most recent shooting of “When We Break, We Breathe”, an interactive film.
Find more information about their work on the Naming All the Flowers website, or their instagram, @namingalltheflowers.
Written by Emma Powell, Photos courtesy of Maddie Vassalo