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…What Roun envisions is the fruit of collaborative labor between students, LDs and music and live performance artists for graphics and lighting design. 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. "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."
-Dan Daley, from "The Biz," PLSN, Dec. 2010.
