Collaboration between academia and business has become, well, big business. Since 1980 there have been over 4,300 start-ups that were incubated in U.S. universities, and new spin-off and technology and patent licensing deals are cut seemingly weekly. A burgeoning version of that is incubating in the mind of Dana Roun, a director at Full Sail University, which has the largest single plant of all the media arts & sciences schools in the U.S.
That campus got a little bit bigger this year with the opening of the Full Sail Studios Gateway Project, a 22,000-square-foot multi-purpose facility used to teach stage, lighting and projection crafts.
But the Gateway center could become more than a gi-normous, technologically dazzling lecture hall and lab for the students in Full Sail's stage production degree program – it might be the template for another kind of university-business collaboration that would have significant implications for LDs and others in production graphics.
Taking it Up a Notch
What Roun envisions scrolling across the 48-by-16 LED display and emanating from the three Barco HD projectors that illuminate the screens around the stage is the fruit of collaborative labor between students, LDs and music and live performance artists for graphics and lighting design.
"Animated graphics have become huge in the live music business and in other sectors of live performance, and poorly done graphics really disappoint audiences who have come to expect high-resolution, creative animation," says Roun. But, he adds, high-quality animation can be expensive to render and produce. In addition to the boutique companies that currently do a lot of the custom animated content used in high-end projection systems, students in Full Sail's stage production, game creation and other video parts programs would offer alternatives through collaboration amongst each other across campus and their artist-clients, such as LDs, from anywhere, using platforms like the new Green Hippo Hippotizer media server that is part of the new Gateway center's technology complement and an extensive array of lighting systems from Martin and other manufacturers.
An Asset Farm
"Basically, what we're talking about building here is an asset farm, with creative content made in partnership with artists for their shows," Roun explains. "It becomes a lab where students build a bank of visual assets in the form of projection video, graphics and lighting design and integrate that for any of a number of types of clients and integrate the content across the production systems."
The equipment the students can use is certainly up to the task. The Gateway Project is fitted with a High End Systems Catalyst media server, an MA Lighting grandMA Ultra-Light Series 2 lighting console; Martin MAC 700 Wash and Profile fixtures, Stagebar 54L and MAC 401 dual moving head LED lighting fixtures; a dozen ETC Source Four Zoom 15°-30° ellipsoidal spotlights; Lycian 1275 followspots; and a Leprecon MX series 48-channel touring dimmer rack and moving light AC distribution rack.
Discounts and Credits
The service wouldn't be free, but neither is it intended to do more than fund further R&D for additional platforms and equipment for students to use. Roun suggests that the business could be tiered, ranging from letting clients choose to rent images and graphics designs for limited use from the collection built up by students as part of class work, right through custom creation of graphics that would be owned by the client.
"The clients are able to get graphics at more cost-effective prices, but more important than the money this could generate is that it builds significant credits that the students could have on their resumes by the time they graduate," he says.
Roun says he's polled his database of lighting designers – some who are Full Sail graduates – and the feedback has been uniformly positive. "They like the idea; they like that it gives their clients a much bigger range of ideas to choose from at costs every level of client can afford," he says. "An LD calls up and says he needs an image of a blue mountain – we put it out to the students, and the LD can choose among the results from a file that's already been created."
A Storehouse of Visuals
Roun says the infrastructure needed to put the idea on to a production level is not quite there yet, but will be by mid-2011. The business model could be similar to that now used for sound effects libraries and stock footage, with a la carte pricing predicated on the basis of licenses or buy-outs. To let the broadest range of potential users access images ands graphics, some kind of point-of-sale proposition would have to be developed for commodity-like end of the business, such as an iTunes type of Internet interface. Copyright and other intellectual property issues would also have to be addressed.
Media schools have long had symbiotic relationships with equipment manufacturers, but they've generally been of the promotional sort that provide technology platforms for schools to use in exchange for an opportunity for the manufacturers to imprint their brands on aspiring media arts hopefuls just as they're starting their careers. That's mostly been a win-win for all involved and should continue.
But what Dana Roun is contemplating goes well beyond that. As the collaboration between students, LDs and artists increases, manufacturers can participate by watching the creative process of graphic content creation up close, where the methodologies used could be become feedback that ultimately transforms the products they make, thereby further streamlining the creative process. Now that's a win-win-win-win.
