What You’re Gonna Get...

To USC film students, the Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts is like a box of chocolates. They can’t believe what they’re gonna get.
The $25 million facility houses the latest industry-standard equipment. Indeed, it goes one step beyond that standard. “This is way more visionary than anything that’s going on in any segment of the real industry,” Zemeckis told the Los Angeles Times in March.
Some highlights from the center’s box of high-tech confections:

- Two digital editing labs featuring 60 IBM Intellistations running Avid Xpress DV software. These non-linear editorial systems were specially designed to edit digital video and feature powerful special-effects and video-layering capabilities.

- High-tech visual effects equipment, including a green screen studio, a visual effects lab for creating CGI (computer-generated imagery)visual elements, a Quantel Edit Box for compositing and animating digital images, and four multimedia classrooms with video projectors and touch-screen controls for digital recording and playback.

- Digital sound equipment, including multi-track recording, audio sweetening and Avid Pro Tools audio editing and mixing equipment.

- Five sound stages equipped for single- and multi-camera production, and the Universal Studios Motion Control and Performance Capture Laboratory, which houses the Vicon motion capture system that renders 3D moving images.

- The 49-seat Ron Howard Screening Room, with 16mm, 35mm and digital projection capabilities as well as a custom-designed 10.2-channel surround audio system.

- The programming offices of Trojan Vision, USC’s student-run TV station.

- Individual editorial suites housing advanced picture and sound editing equipment.

- An equipment center where students can access more than 100 digital cameras as well as Betacams, lighting kits and audio equipment.

Faculty from every cinema school department use the center in their teaching. Nick Stanton, a junior in the filmic writing program, has already logged many hours in the Avid editing room to assemble projects for his basic production class. “It’s a piece of cake to edit. You can make stuff that you shoot around your apartment with your roommates look like a presentable film,” Stanton says. “I’m glad I didn’t come here two years earlier and not get to take advantage of all these neat toys.”
USC cinema-TV students who “get their hands on these tools and really use them to make their films will be ahead of the game when they get out,” says Zemeckis.
Of course, the rapid pace of technological advances also means an increased pace for obsolescence. Asked if keeping the equipment in the center up-to-date is going to be a problem, Zemeckis responds straight-forwardly. “The joke that we all live with is that by the time we take our new computer out of the box, it’s obsolete. That’s the way it’s going to be in the entire industry, and in the film school,” he says, then smiles. “But you’ve got to start somewhere.”

ZA few treats inside the Z: (from left) the Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa sound stages, one of two Avid digital editing labs, and the Ron Howard Screening Room. Says Dean Elizabeth Daley: “The students coming out of here will, for the first time, know more than the people who are actually working in the industry.”