With box-office hits ranging from the Back to the Future trilogy to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Forrest Gump, director Robert Zemeckis ’73 knows a thing or two about the digital revolution in special effects. And so will hundreds of USC students when the 35,000-square-foot digital arts center that bears his name is completed this spring.
Over the past year, workers have totally overhauled the former Performing Arts Annex near the northeastern corner of the University Park Campus. The product of their labor is a “one-of-a-kind studio” that offers a “digitial palette” to free students’ imaginations, says cinema-television dean Elizabeth Monk Daley.
Among the center’s wealth of technological resources:
- Non-linear digital editing and shooting systems. Students no longer must comb through reels of film, laboriously cutting and splicing the segments in sequence. Raw footage is instead digitally translated and loaded onto computers, where it can be edited randomly and reassembled.
- Digital stages with motion-control computers. By using computers to control camera positioning, operators can exactly replicate the camera’s movements as many times as necessary.
- Digital compositing equipment, such as a Quantel Domino special-effects workstation. Film editors can translate celluloid images to a digital format, creatively manipulate them, and then convert them back to film. Combined with motion-control cameras, digital compositing allows editors to create many special effects, alter colors and generate crowd scenes.
With the digital infusion comes the demise of the Super-8 film cameras that USC students have lugged around for nearly four decades. Beginning last fall, students in the graduate production program made their first films with digital video cameras; production undergrads join them this year.
Students focusing on television production will also benefit. “This facility is equipped with almost anything you need to produce television,” says Don Tillman, executive director of Trojan Vision, the student-operated television station based in the Zemeckis Center. A TV veteran of 40 years, Tillman says many commercial stations don’t have this much digital equipment.
Zemeckis put $5 million toward the facility’s expected $15 million total. A host of other big names have also contributed to the structure, including filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who kicked $2 million each into the till; Ron and Cheryl Howard, who contributed $750,000; film producers David Geffen and John Wells, who pledged $1 million and $500,000, respectively; and Fox Filmed Entertainment and Warner Bros., which donated $500,000 each.
“Digital technology enhances the storytelling process in ways that have never been possible before,” says Daley. “With the Zemeckis Center, the first major educational center for digital production will be here at USC.”

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