Visual and sound arts school taps Marines Sonic Solutions

By Charles Gallardo

Dan Jenkins, 21, wants to start his own jazz, jungle and hip-hop record label. By the time the new millennium rolls around, he thinks he'll be just about ready. Jenkins is one of the 60 students beginning classes today at the Ex'pression Center for New Media, a new Emeryville school offering an intensive 14-month training program in digital visual media and sound arts-using DVD workstations from Sonic Solutions in Novato. I've been trying to get involved in the music industry for a couple of years," Jenkins said. At looked like everything I wanted in a school. I can come here anytime I want, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and make music. Dutch tycoon's brainchild The Ex'pression Center for New Media is the brainchild of Dutch software tycoon Eckart V0intw* and Gary Platt, an audio engineer and producer who has recorded such artists as Bon Jovi, King Crimson, Bootsy Collins and the Ohio Players. The students' high-tech training will include the use of eight DVD workstations from Sonic Solutions. The school selected Sonic DVD Creator as the tool to prepare its students for DVD (digital versatile disc) production work, Platt said. If the school wants to have its students learn on the same equipment that is used in the real world, they did their homework, because Sonic Solutions' equipment is used in about 70 percent of all DVD production worldwide, said Chris Kryzan, Sonic Solutions' director of engineering and marketing. A surge in demand for DVD titles in the last several months has created an exploding demand for those trained in DVD productions, a demand that outstrips supply, he said. For Wintzen, multimedia Id virtual reality could eventually lead to people traveling ens, placing less of a burden n the environment. 'I'm fascinated by the new media, because I think this is technology that is going to rule the world in the coming millennium," he said. "This is going to be the big change in our culture, almost like printing" In 1996, Wintzen sold his privately held software company, BSO/Origins, to Philips Electronics for $800 million. Since that time, he has started about a dozen companies that combine commerce pith his interest in the environment and pressing social issues. Wintzen's latest venture is bankrolling the Ex'pression Center, on which he has spent $23 million converting a vacant 65,000-squarefoot building into a state-of the art multimedia training round. Looking for challenge "The choice of the companies I'm involved in either have a social aspect or an environmental aspect," Wintzen said. As part of my thinking and character and way of living, I like to have fun and I like to have fun together with doing business. I would get so bored being retired. So I put to my self these challenges." His companies range from Advanced Immunit, a biomedical laboratory focusing on AIDS research, to the Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream franchise for the Benelux countries. Organized under his company Ex'tent, other Wintzen enterprises include Ex'perience, a public relations firm; Ex'cursion, a sailing vessel charter; Ex'ofoon, a broadband communications development company; and Source, a magazine about creating a sustainable future. The immediate goal of the Ex'pression Center is to produce work-ready graduates for the audio and video entertainment and digital media industries. Students spend 45 hours a week in training, Platt said, working on the same equipment that is found in top recording and production facilities. "People don't come here to find themselves," he said.

Vision

They come with the attitude of 'I know what I want and I want it bad'. Classes include instruction in 3D modeling, 3-D and 2-D animation, digital visual effects for films and videos, Web site development, music recording and editing, sound effects and live sound. In addition to the high-tech equipment, the center has a 200seat theater for live performances, a garage studio" to give students the feel of a start-up company, and a maintenance classroom for instruction on trouble-shooting and maintaining high-tech equipment.

New York architect

The interior of the center, which looks like a hip South of Market multimedia company, was designed by John Storyk. The New York architect has designed more than 900 studios, including the Electric Lady Studios in New York, which he designed for Jimi Hendrix. The Ex'pression program costs $27,700 for the visual media program and $25,700 for the sound program. Each program has 30 students, who will spend three hours a day in the classroom and six hours using to -the-line equipment, Platt said. In addition to his experience in the recording industry, Platt was senior vice president and director of education at Full Sail school in Winter Park, Fla. Similar to the Ex'pression Center, Full Xail trains students for careers in the entertainment and multimedia industries. This is the program I always wanted to create," he said. Our students will get a total immersion in sound and visual arts like nobody else can provide. And they'll have a blast while they're doing it." Some of the tools are so sophisticated," Kryzan said. Schools like this provide a source of people who are trained and can step in from day one." Ryan Price, a 22-year-old from Walnut Creek, is in the school's video program. One of the appeals of the school, he said, was the 14month program, as opposed to four-year schools that offer multimedia training, such as San Francisco State University and Academy of Art College in San Francisco. I'm hoping the school can show me the direction of what I can specialize in," - Price said. Tm skeptically in the sense that it is such a new school, but I hope they can live up to what they said about fig. The school received temporary creditation in September. For 111 state accreditation, 85 percent of the students must get jobs in audio or visual arts within six months, Platt said. But with the booming multimedia industry-ranging from feature films to corporate presentations- Platt is confident Ex'pression Center graduates will land jobs in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch and other centers of new media.

'Era of incredible change'

We're standing on the cusp of an era of incredible change, very similar to when television came into its own 30 years ago," he said. We're a drop in the bucket for the amount of people who are going to be needed out there." Prospective employers could include special-effects giants in, the Bay Area, such as Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Silicon Graphics and Skywalker Sound, Platt said. Multimedia meshes with Wintzen's idea of an ''extracted value tax," which charges Compaq nies for using environmental space, such as polluting the air. The price of an airline ticket, for example, would include the price of polluting the air. You'd have a system where everybody would have to pay not only for the economic value, but the extracted value, the value that is being extracted from the planet to make this product. Traveling wouldn't be so popular." As an alternative to travel, Wintzen envisions using superwide bandwidth and multimedia technology to produce a global version of virtual reality, for which entire cities would be wired for video and sound. As virtual reality becomes more sophisticated, more people will choose to explore cyberspace, rather than, say, taking a trip to the beach or abroad," he said.