The Expressway” to Education”

By Michelle Gamble-Risley

The Ex'pression Center for New Media opens its doors to offer students a "total-immersion boot camp" in high-tech arts.

Back in college most professionals took an internship and worked for pennies just to get that hands-on experience to qualify them for that first job. A lucky few even parlayed that internship into a real job with good pay. And for those who didn't get a job via the internship, the experience certainly looked great on their resumes and probably opened many doors to other opportunities.

Today, students can get that same kind of hands-on experience and possibly that first great job by attending a new Emeryville-based school called the Ex'pression Center for New Media. This new high-tech school recently began accepting enrollment for their 14-month program slated to begin in January 1999. Classes will offer nothing but valuable real-world experience to help students get jobs in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and arts and high-tech centers around the world.

The Center is run by award-winning architect John Storyk and founder Gary Platt, who received temporary approval from the state of California in September to operate this premier digital media and sound arts career training center.

"Ex'pression is a specific kind of school for the entertainment business," explained Platt. "We offer two main programs - one for sound arts and another for digital visual media, including 3D modeling, 3D and 2D animation and website design."

Although learning the applications can be difficult, Platt wanted to make it easier by restricting the number of students to 60 per term. Each student will have three hours of classroom instruction each day, plus six more hours of hands-on laboratory experience using state-of-the-art equipment in a facility once used by high-tech company Sybase. Faculty supervision and support is available with an excellent ratio of 30 students per instructor.

"It's a tough experience that we want to make fun at the same time," said Platt. "The average student goes to college and spends about 18 hours a week on it. At our school, students go 45 hours a week and spend about nine hours a day working on real projects. We offer about 1/3 of it as class time and 2/3 as lab time. Students go to class and learn part of what they're going to be doing in the lab. Once in the lab, they use the real tools to build a project every day until they have full-blown experience doing it."

FACILITY FEATURES
The facility features a Digital Studer Studio designed for cutting-edge sound recording. The studio houses a 24-bit digital Studer 950 audio console, 96 digital inputs, a 48-track DASH Studer tape machine, Studer V-8 digital production machines and a host of outboard equipment from dbx, Lexicom, Digitech and others.

There is also a facility called the Tascam "Heptagon" Studio, which is an innovative teaching area. It incorporates six independent yet synchronized control rooms wrapped around a single acoustic studio. Each student can use this area to record the same artist or group simultaneously and independently of one another.

Each of the six control rooms feature a digital Tascam 8000 32-input console, a Protools 24 workstation, an Apple G3 computer, a fully loaded MIDI musical instrument workstation and digital video recorders and players. The studio itself also has Tascam input consoles, digital tape machines, DA-30 DAT digital tape machines and the TascamTM D800 Digital Console for automated digital mixing and recording.

Other equipment and software available for students to use includes: the SSL 4000G Suite, which includes a recording console; the Neve VR Suite, a computer with a software tool that employs a recall and moving fader automation package; an SGI Computer Suite, a computer system that helps artists create high-end graphics; SoftImage Digital Lab, a visual workstation; an Apple Computer Suite, which contains 18 Apple G3 computers and two 20-inch screens at each station; the NT Computer Suite, which contains a platform to create 3D animation on an NT system; Roland Digital Suite, which is used to create digital audio and editing for video and TV and much more.

There is also a full-performance theater with a blue screen. It's equipped to display any media produced at the school. It will be used for both classes and live theater lighting and sound. The blue screen will also be used for computer-generated images for special effects that are typically seen in films.

HEAR IT, SPEAK IT, DO IT
"This is about total immersion," said Platt. "When you put students in an environment where they eat, sleep and breath technology, there's no way they're not going to walk away knowing it. Most students love this stuff anyway and can't get enough of it. What we're really doing is giving them a booster shot. We're teaching them the theories and backing it up with the applications and experience. You retain something when you're required to not only listen to it, but play it back - and that's what we're here to help students do."

For more information, contact the Ex'pression Center for New Media, 6601-6603 Shellmound St., Emeryville, CA 94608, call 510/304-2411, or visit the website at http://www.xnewmedia.com. Michelle Gamble-Risley is the research director for Government Technology Market Navigator. She can be e-mailed at mgrisley@govtech.net.