Presentations and Discussion (edited)

 

(Rod Bishop)              “I would like to introduce John Bird who is going to give the keynote address to this conference.  John is a 34-year veteran of arts education in Australia.  His career spans the teaching of film, television animation, computer animation, interactive media and online media.  In 1966 he became a foundation staff member at the first film and television school in Australia, instigating and developing the first post graduate program in film, television and animation.  In 1984 he became the director and manager of the Computer Animation Centre, an industry and government funded research, development and training program in computer animation, computer graphics and publishing.

 

“In 1992 he established, AIM, the Animation and Interactive Multimedia Centre, the first post-graduate program of its type in Australia.  In 1996 this program had grown into a major centre for the new media, offering graduate diploma, masters and doctoral qualifications.  Once again, a first in Australia. 

 

“John is now an adjunct professor at RMIT University in Melbourne and a visiting professor at Monash University Centre for Telecommunications and Information Engineering.  He has become one of Australia's leading experts in online media and online delivery. RMIT has recognised John's contribution to the field by establishing the John Bird Award for Excellence in Online Production. While it's easy to summarise John's career like this, with an impressive but nevertheless dry and impersonal resume, it does not convey the many battles that John has fought during his three decades in film and television education.

 

“Fifteen years ago when the first Apple Mac began to suggest the potential for digital production in film and television training, John became an outspoken advocate of this new technology but it did not necessarily win him any friends.  In fact, many of his colleagues were quite openly hostile.  John held to his line and kept boldly prophesying that a brave new world for film and television production and distributed learning would eventuate.

 

“When John began publicly speaking about the potential of convergence and the possibilities of online Multimedia as a new era for film and television education, many thought he was crazy.  Many of us still do.  Perhaps not for the same reasons.  The former head of the Centro de Capacitacion Cinematografica in Mexico and former president of Cilect, Gustavo Montiel, tells his new students that they are the equivalent of Aztec warriors starting out on a life long battle to secure Mexican National Cinema.

 

“I don't know quite how this metaphor translates to Australia.  Kangaroo warriors or koala warriors don't quite have the same resonance but Americans might say, whatever, John is still a true warrior for his cause and it gives me great pleasure to present the keynote address for this conference.

 

(John Bird)     “This is my first visit to Los Angeles and I'm honoured to be in the presence of such talent and insight.  I will try and share some of my own.

 

“I would like you to think about where you may have been in 1969, specifically, October 1969.  At UCLA a computer was linked with a computer at Stanford Research.  This was the first link in the “Internet chain”. I guess most of us couldn’t imagine the start of that network would have any relevance whatsoever to the issues we're trying to grapple with at the moment.

 

“ I would ask you to think about the business card you've got in your pocket. On it is a physical address, a telephone number and possibly an e-mail or Internet address - the first step into the portal of your position in time and space, quite different from the geography of your residential or your professional address.  And there we begin the move from a physical environment into an interconnected global environment.

 

“The titles of the address of this conference have an emphasis upon learning but the flip side to this is teaching. Learning and communicating are the most mysterious aspects of the entire (human) processes, as anybody who has observed a child will know.

 

“Despite our access to global connections and some of the most sophisticated media, we shouldn't be disappointed if we can't put together all the connections at this conference, but rather, unzip some of the possibilities.  In his welcome, Rod referred to a point in the beginning of a computer animation period.  In the early 1960s computer scientists were looking at the process of computer animation and how they might make a contribution to it. 

 

“They tried to tackle the tedious and boring processes of the animator and failed because they did not identify that this role related to the artistic process. The process layer underneath animation was the one they should have tackled.  About 10 years later we saw the emergence of computerisation in animation, which did try to address the tasks which were debilitating (the animator) and taking the life out of the creative process. These were the Digital Paint Box and the digital animation systems we know today.

 

“I suffer from dyslexia so when I encountered a word processor for the first time it was absolutely liberating.  Here I could make mistakes and this enabled me to write in ways that I could never do before. 

“When a family illness forced me to work from home I had to find a way of transcending the geography. Online production and using the Internet became a necessity to try to manage a new and emergent department.  It was very difficult for my staff, but what it meant is that I traveled by train with a PowerBook on my knee, then plugged it in at home and made connections to them. 

 

“Distance education is not a new concept, yet each generation tries to come to grips with basically the same sorts of issues. Australia is a rather large landscape and in the 1930s they developed a communication process called the Tregear pedal wireless.  It was a large box that had foot pedals on it like a bicycle, which was a generator.

 

“That communication system enabled the Royal Australian Flying Doctor Service - people could carry it on pack horses, on camels and on cars where there are literally hundreds of miles of separation.  From that a radio system of education was developed. We cannot explore the future of learning at a distance without also exploring implications of what it means to teach at a distance.

 

“The infrastructure of the school being in a different time and space than the geographic school, also needs us to rethink it in terms of access of seven-days-a-week global time zones.  The Internet provides the prospect of global universal access, but so too it entails the bridging of other barriers, language and cultural and ethnic groupings.

 

“What has fundamentally changed during the last decade in the evolution of the motion picture medium is the move from analogue to digital production mode - the so-called interactive Multimedia era in which the creator and the audience can more directly engage.

 

“The Internet and broadcast television, as it moves into datacasting and to digital interaction television, are again on a rapidly convergent path.  For Australians, interactive television will be with us in about two-and-a-half years and film and television schools are being looked at for insights into leadership and research. 

 

“If we want to know about the future of our film, we will really have to sit down in the audience today, and listen and learn from them. In much the same way, if we want to understand distance learning we are going to have to sit in the audience as a learner at a distance.

 

“The politicians and many education administrators might see the adoption of on-line learning as an economic model. I don't think it will be for the next 10 or 15 years.  What really is the issue is the quality of the model.  How can we enhance the process, liberate ideas with different modes and approaches to it?

 

“One of my colleagues had worked for 32 years in the National Australia Broadcasting Commission. In the early 1990s he tried to influence the Commission to adopt the Internet in the design of what was to become the first of the digital studios in Melbourne at Southbank. In January 1996, he was told to give up because they wouldn’t do it.

 

“Three months later the ABC changed their mind and established ABC Online, which is now one of the major cultural doorways to Australia. My colleague developed the beginnings of this on his home computer.  The key point I want to make is that all of us are touching the edge of exploring a new medium.  Trying to find its artistic heart and trying to communicate with somebody else.

 

“It is a vaporous endeavor trying to give form to the invisible. In my view great teachers that give us insight, and the great experiences of life, are those that liberate us as learners to realise our own dreams.  So we really need to begin to dream. 

 

“The Dreamtime is something described by the Australian aboriginal community as being an integral part of their life.  A continuing part that dates back to the beginnings of time.  Daydreaming is in part the dreaming of futures.  Recently I joined a radio-controlled thermal soaring group and learnt something about trying to visualise the invisible.

 

“These master pilots began to talk to me about feeling the angel's kiss on the back of their neck and seeing and smelling the air. Then you watch them hang launch a glider from shoulder height, it begins to ascend and they coach it until it is a speck in the sky. And then to accelerate this speck and have it zoom down and whistle past you at 150 kilometres an hour before it ascends again, and then gently come to alight in your hand.

 

“These are the sorts of understandings of the medium we will have to try to deal with as we shape relationships with people - not wires or connections.  So we begin with dreams.  My granddaughter at four was very happily and confidently using my Mac and making animation programs and saying to me:  "Pa, what sound does an octopus make?" Going up to the microphone and gurgle, gurgle, gurgle and sync-ing sound to her animation programs.

 

“Only 10 years earlier I had received a government grant to try to put in place the first computer animation industry training programs in Australia.  That was in parallel to what was happening here in the States because we bought the gear from the States. My granddaughter is now eight and she and her colleagues from the local primary school are happily making and authoring web pages, and communicating with students across the globe. Where do they learn?

 

“In 1956 in Australia we had the Olympics in Melbourne.  That might not seem to have a great deal of connection to other things, but it also brought television.  Ten years later I encountered the first generation of students entering a university program, of which I was involved, who wanted to make films.

“I knew nothing about making films.  I was an illustrator, a graphic designer. We knew nothing about the process of making films but we were impelled by the fact that these students at 18, who had sat through the 1956 Olympics and television for the next 10 years, had acquired insights about a language that we did not know.  I was of the print era they were not.  It was an audacious aspiration, absolutely lunatic.

 

“We started, we said:  "We are going to have a film school."  We named it Moron Island and the students from the graphic design program transferred, and before we knew it the course had exploded. We had one Bolex and a Super 8 camera!  There were two young women in that group.  Jill Bilcock (then Stevenson) was the editor of Elizabeth and Romeo and Juliet.  The other was Gillian Armstrong who became the first really distinguished young female director with My Brilliant Career.

 

“So you never can quite tell the treasure trove of human potential that you have in your company.  About 10 years later there was another inflow and it came from within the industry itself.  They were in their thirties and forties and strangely they were drawn back.  And in part I could see this coming and I said:  "Okay, we won't run continuous undergraduate programs, we will just run a one-year course.  Come in, wherever you've come from, from whatever your discipline area is."  And so we had computer scientists, doctors, lawyers and theologians.

 

“I had two colleagues, who in 1973 set off on a ludicrous expedition to be the first white men to cross the Australian Simpson Desert.  Now the Simpson Desert is about the size of England, so it's not a short walk. About a week after they had set out Charles McCubbin's wife received a radio telegram through the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which is our main inland network, and it read:  "I have seen the desert bloom.  A flower garden the size of England.  Charles."

 

“Charles had witnessed one of the rare events in the Australian desert. It had rained and with it, a burst of life and flowering had arrived. So the desert was carpeted for hundreds of miles with flowers.  He described trees clad with a shimmering iridescent green of amazing green leaves that peeled away as they approached and reformed again on trees further away.  These were budgerigars (birds). 

 

“This is like the experiences I have of the web, that there is a rush of life occurring in this convergent process which is liberating a level of creativity I certainly haven't experienced before, across a wide range of interdisciplinary areas.  In some respects it seems only yesterday when surfing the net was something that ebullient boys do in their bedroom.  Today the board riders are those in business suits and in corporations.

 

“A decade or so back the two digit date code was an elegant, efficient line of code, today it is a monumental problem but it also gives us compelling insights into how globally interconnected and interdependent we are.  Around the world we have seen government planners looking at the shortfall which has occurred in the information technology sector.  One of the tragedies is that most of those reports are looking at information technology and not at the next step in the process. 

 

“We in film and television schools really now have to look at and prepare ourselves for the wave that is going to hit us within the next five years.  I predict that there will be an absolute explosion of demand upon film and television and all of the media or literate time based audio-visual art forms within this next five years.

 

“The developments are being impelled by other factors, the personal and the artistic.  The allure of a new medium.  The prospects of being an author and a publisher, and of having a global audience. This social shift of the lifelong learning embrace and the economic awakening that the real treasure if you are an investor, is not going to be in the manufacture of boxes, it is going to be in the ownership of the intellectual recipe book of content.

 

“I believe we are beginning to see the shift and the experience that this has happened before in the investment sector.  If this happened once before with film where it began to reprocess the theatrical arts and to try to record it and moved into its own domain, we saw it occur with television.  I think some in the investment sector are beginning to see that the content providers are much safer than dealing with the boxes and the wires.

 

“Some of this expansion may be taken up with the demand upon the education sector and commercial educational providers. In my view distance education or distance learning is inevitable.  It is not a question of will it be, it is going to be and I think we need to face what we can do with it.  Some of it may be driven by the economics of people becoming aware that if they can move the student or the staff member outside the school, and have them there with their own home studio, workstation, they can shift some of the responsibilities, economic responsibilities outside of the school.

 

“But it is also going to increase demand for specialist and skilled teaching staff.  We can't have a learning expansion without a consequential expansion in the teaching sector.  A useful model for what might be is the tourist industry.  The tourist economy is based upon destinations in geographic space.  The information economy is based on destinations in cyberspace.  The trick is how do you make your destination as exotic as The Great Barrier Reef, and then see the other support services fill in behind it.

 

“I was once asked to provide some level of Internet connection for a lady named Sue, who was dying of cystic fibrosis and was in hospital waiting for a double lung transplant.  Sue began to use the Internet and found out quite a lot of information, so she was able to contribute quite significantly to her own treatment and to the treatment of others. 

 

“So here we have a person who was suffering from an illness but is finding a way to make connections through a wider universe even though she can't speak very well.  It was Mother's Day and we got a call at 1.30 am. My wife answered and I could hear her saying:  "Of course, we'll pray, yes of course we'll pray love."  And she came back to the bedroom and said:  "That was Sue, they are preparing her for transplant and she wanted us to pray for her."

 

“We were really quite shaken. I felt compelled to send a message to Sue (on the e-mail), as I did every day, although I had already sent some that day.  It wasn't until I logged on that a message popped back in, that it hit me. Here was a message from Sue, which had been, time-dated a half-hour before she phoned. I realised that this girl who we'd never met had decided to ring us in that half-hour window when she was being prepared for a double lung transplant.

 

“Sue survived the operation and we met her for the first time and took her to the theatre in Melbourne.  But the issue really about connection is connection to somebody, and I guess this is the heart of the issue of learning. The process with Sue was entirely unexpected and how it occurred I don't know, but the learning game is a two-way process. 

 

“There is also another thing I would like to leave you with.  I experienced the beginnings of a very small film school and we were strapped for cash.  We got a 70-year-old man to be our storeman.  He knew nothing about film making.  George Grace worked in our store and stayed about 10 years. When George finally left we realised the tremendous human network George had played in the process of building a learning environment.  That fabric of connection was at a human level.  So what I am trying to leave here is that it isn’t always the wires, there are some elements in the process that are going to engage and need to engage the human network.

 

 “When I leave this conference and I'm going to Washington to see my brother. He has worked with some of the really bright minds in plasma physics and aerospace research and he wants me to be introduced to a brilliant young woman who he describes as the brightest and fastest learner he has ever encountered.

 

“According to him, this lady makes new discoveries every week.  A week or so back she discovered her toes.  She can now roll over on her tummy.  She is four months old.  In his late fifties my brother became a parent for the first time.  He has discovered that Katherine is not merely their baby daughter, she is a unique person.   So if you wish to really discover the nature of interactive learning in its most perfected and elegant form, you need to really look at that interaction between mother and child as they entrust their past and they share their futures.”

 

(Rod Bishop)             “This session is to discuss the issue of online activity in terms of evolving distributed learning.  The other issue to be discussed is the development of corroborative software tools for online film and television production, to enable teaching into remote locations.

 

“We will look at what sort of marketing models exist and how people feel about the pedagogical implications of online learning, whether it differs significantly from traditional learning, how you go about marketing it and what the markets might be. Most people agree this type of distributed learning for film and television schools really represents a series of different markets. 

 

“In this session, Nick De Martino, the Director of Strategic Strategy at the American Film Institute (AFI) will be discussing the assets it currently possesses for online delivery.  John Smithies from Cinemedia in Melbourne will be talking about content management for video on demand systems. John Bird will be discussing a specific project from RMIT, that is a computer animation project for web delivery to remote locations. Finally, Russ Naughton, also from Melbourne, will be talking about Radio Australia's online services.

 

(Mr De Martino)        “The AFI is an educational institution that is somewhat different to the others represented here.  Although we confer degrees, our activities extend beyond our educational mission.  We have film preservation efforts, we expand our technologies and we showcase excellence in film festivals and on television.

 

“Our formal training programs include The Centre for Advanced Film and Television Studies, which is our conservatory, degree-granting institution, currently accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. It is about to be accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which will positively impact on the degrees we offer and the students we are able to train.

 

“In addition, for many years we have offered extension courses in the conventional screenwriting, directing and producing in film and television. More recently we started courses in advanced technology.  Then there is the category that I call immersion workshops such as the Californian Digital Arts Workshop that offers the opportunity for fine artists, including filmmakers, to make a conversation in their current areas to the digital media. And the AFI Intel Enhanced Television where we are doing some of the things that were alluded to with reference to the digital environment for television. 

 

“Our fundamental model is not dissimilar to other conservatory-based institutions.  By this I mean students, whether they matriculate or not, come to the AFI to learn by application. The emphasis is on getting critiqued and making an actual work of art. We also continue the tradition of apprenticeship – studying with the masters.  

 

“The idea of distance education or learning is not a model that fits terribly well the AFI today. We have to see to what extent we can scale the model we currently have, versus doing a different model entirely.

 

“Certainly, like many of you, we have expertise in training.  We also have, and this is fairly critical for the online world, 30 years of assets that we own copyright title to. This includes lectures, films that our students have produced and television shows for the general public.

 

“Our current market is the professional market. This works well because we are located in Hollywood with proximity to the talent base. But we expect this to change with the Internet. Another market is faculties and instructors elsewhere, with the train-the-trainer model. 

 

“The K12 is a most fruitful and challenging area. With the low cost and universal access of available image production tools, educational institutions will have to adopt new measures because young people will learn to communicate differently than they currently do.  Literature is different as a result of these tools.  Literature is a broad term that I use to reference all of film culture and multimedia.

 

“Finally the public categories I have divided into cinefile (the general public) and youth.  We think they are a market who understand they need to experience and contextualise what came before, to understand the movies of today.  So what are some of the pieces of the puzzle?  First of all a huge part of it in the area we are currently engaged in at the AFI is converting the assets to IP based files, to the Internet protocol.

 

 “To make it valuable we need to develop acceptable tool sets that make the production easier than it currently is. We have to create interactive applications as well for learning and this is really a very sophisticated software development challenge.  That implies massive testing. Finally because we are talking about being on the Internet, we need to master it.  I don't think any of us, at least at AFI, have the answer to how to effectively market on the Internet, but we need to learn.

 

“ I want to say a word about platform and delivery options because it is not restricted to the Internet even though we believe that is the core of it.  First and foremost is television itself.  This is conventional broadcast television cable and digital broadband.

 

“I point to multi-point video, which can be done by either the satellite or IP network. This is an important model, because the master teacher that provides a vision of what is significant or important in a particular work of art is not available in other locations, and could be a tremendous value to a learning environment that is based on distance.

 

“Even though some of the video streaming technologies today seem a bit primitive, this is a very shortsighted observation. They are constantly improving and it's what we do with it that counts.  Having said that let's not forget CD-ROM and the DVD.  Hard media is not a bad thing to distribute these assets on, and there are also enormous opportunities for hybrid development between the DVD and the Internet.

 

“Also, text books will need rethinking because the server will be the text book.  A multi media server that allows you to combine text, graphic, animation, video, audio, is an enormous value, and it's also an enormous job to produce. Then finally, let us not ever forget the live-in-theatre experience of viewing the motion picture, such as the classic movie Citizen Kane that was made to be viewed in the theatre.

 

“We are an adopter of the advanced television enhancement forum standard, backed by content companies like Sony, Warner Bros and Disney, technology companies like Intel and Microsoft, and distribution companies like TCI and Discovery Networks. 

 

“AFI online, (www.afionline.org) began in 1994. It reflects all of the AFI programs that we run in the real world and in virtual method.  It also includes new content that is only available on the Internet, therefore making AFI an online publisher.  We think of it as basically a tool for general audience education, about film and television and digital media, and it is not yet curriculum based. 

 

“The AFI program content includes the catalogues and all of the class activity.  The professional training division is represented here. We can register online and this will be the expansion of a very ripe area for us. Since much of this is tool streaming for computer based learning, we expect that we will be able to expand this into actual courseware.

 

“The television studies’ materials online have served to be a very useful recruitment method. We have profiles of the Faculty and the courses that are offered as well as play excerpts from our filmmakers' work.

 

“AFI is also a membership organisation.  We have thousands of members nationwide and we routinely recruit new members online. We expect this will be the corner stone of a revised web activity because we think there are benefits we can offer uniquely online that we can't offer anywhere else. It gives us the ability to have a customer relationship with members of the public who are well informed of what we do professionally.

 

“I think it's safe to say the traditional hands-on model of cinema education used in the past will be difficult to scale, so we're going to be defining new targets.  This is a large undertaking.  We need new resources, new partners and new collaborators. Expanding the acceptance of screen language in other areas outside the professional training arena is a worthy but not simple goal. Finally, technology is an ally in all of this, because the technology companies want to see these applications flourish for their own enlightened, self-interest reasons, and the power of it is quite remarkable.” 

 

(John Smithies)           “The main issues we're presently dealing with include addressing linear video working for any digital file, and ways of managing interactive content. We're also addressing market segments with the Internet allowing us to go one-on-one.

 

“Content Management Federation Square is the precinct where we're building a new home, and there are a lot of technical issues about the network and serving video around that site. We are looking at what the global network means for collections and copyright management, particularly when you combine it with some form of intelligent distribution that tells you where the files are in the world and what's happening to them.

 

“We are all reasonably familiar with the role of copyrights and payments in this industry particularly with indigenous cultural material.  We looked at artists' rights across three main areas.  The legal rights, it's just establishing the bona fides of ownership.  If those rights are established up front then this can be documented from day one. Given that, the value of those rights needs to be addressed so that at any stage we've got an automatic calculation.  And moral rights is where information about the content can be stored and retrieved, particularly when you do have culturally sensitive material or there is a conflict over rights in some areas.

 

“Added to the complexity of digital environments, apart from any technical difficulties, dealing with digital files is very different to dealing with cans of film or videotape.  We certainly need to have flexibility to control the use of content and report usage to owners.  And what Swift aims to do is to capitalise on that low transaction cost by using Internet technologies, so that when copyright issues need to be addressed it doesn't have to involve people with managing in time somewhere else. It also gives us the ability to store and track complex data sets.

 

“This brings us to the questions relating to flexible conditions for content owners, and this applies to a feature film down to a short film.  If we can deliver this kind of usability then the production sector can go off in another direction.

 

“In most cases owners are attracted to a set of standard agreements, but where this changes is with for example, the solo person, such as a producer who has content they want to share with others, or other information.  Swift is able to deal with all the complexities of owners' rights and what they want done with the work.

 

“There are different pricing structures, and the owner nominates what they want to charge, as opposed to the middle person, who may be the distributor. Disbursement of returns is also accessible to the owner and calculations can be tracked over time.

 

“Then there's the general reporting and information.  As a content owner I want to see who’s done what with it, and when they've seen it.  A lot of valuable market information comes out of that and an owner can start to see what's been happening with the titles.

 

“The copyright management system is what Swift is.  It does the switching and the checking across these different databases and then there's a video server technology.

 

“To give you a rough ‘architecture’ picture.  There is the local content management system that sits on a box and your local video server.  As a client user I will find the work I want by connecting to the host catalogue.  I decide what I want to see and the copyright management system checks a), that I'm registered to use that content or get access to it, and b) that the content is available for that kind of usage.  It then knows how I receive it, and it goes to the mass storage side of the organisation and delivers it to the local server.

 

“Of course, once you send the file out of the network you get problems.  To solve that we're looking at encrypting the digital video, but we currently have a file out of the remote site, which we need to manage in some way. To get access to that you have to have a live Internet connection.  To go back out and get the key it's going to allow you to view it even on site. Once that's all checked off, the local server delivers it to the client.

 

“If you go to our website today, you would see it divided roughly into two parts.  The left-hand side is general information and the front is just there for viewing.  You don't have to be a member to search the catalogue.  You can look up documentaries and landscape, and come up with a very basic title listing and links. 

 

“They find a particular video, click on, and it just comes up in the normal catalogue entry, synopsis, production details and library of congress subject are headings. An increasing number of our members are using this information to book videos online.

 

“On the left hand side there is more personalised information.  These are titles that you have seen in the catalogue, which you bookmark for later reference. Another way you could search this is to just browse selections. But they are fairly basic browser buttons that have been established.”

 

(Ms Burns)     “According to a recent associated press article there are approximately 26,000 online courses available and approximately 750,000 students taking them. With that large number, it becomes a question of how you're going to teach those students.  

 

“One of the topics I am here to talk to you about is that (going online) can be done on a limited budget.

 

 “I'm going to take you through my website and show you how I teach online.  We live at a site called Artscribe and currently, I believe, we are the only UC Riverside class online, at an undergraduate level, where screen writing is taught one-on-one to the students on the internet.

 

“I'm going to take you through an advanced screenwriting class. What you are seeing now is WebBoard, which allows us to create mailboxes for our students and is interactive with Java.  We create an arena where we have a classroom and a place for each one of these students to live.

 

“We had one student who had to leave UC Riverside at the end of her first quarter.   She went back to San Francisco and entered UC Davis and, where they gave her permission to continue screenwriting through UC Riverside.  We therefore had our first inter-campus student, which means I was able to teach a student from another UC campus, and that is what I am aiming for.  I would like ultimately to be able to have students from every campus here in the state. Also, we can have a look at this student’s complete script, because of this WebBoard.

 

“Another critical success was with a student who took the class concurrently through UC Riverside's extension program.  The money the student paid in extension was $414.  Half of that money came directly into my department. I was able to teach Gail what I felt she needed to know and have kept her for the whole year, and hopefully by the time she finishes she will be a screenwriter.

 

“It's not likely you're going to get someone like this unless they can enrol through other avenues, and she's actually earning true UC units.  These units may have a x on them now, but if she uses them any other way they will not have a x in front of them.

 

“The final thing I want to show you is our virtual classroom.  If the server could handle it, we could have as many as 1000 students in the classroom at one time for a lecture.

 

            “We hope that WebBoard will eventually have whiteboards and other accessories.  Presently however, we can converse with students through ‘DragonSpeak’, which means that a student who cannot type fast can speak their text.

 

“Every student who comes into this classroom will be listed on the right hand side (of the screen).  It allows me to know when they come; when they go; when they get bumped off; whatever happens to them.

 

“How many times do we see students who cannot make a class, and yet the whole quarter's class has been kept for anyone who missed anything.  I have kept five-years’ worth of scripts.

 

“The other thing I like about teaching online is that we can post supplementary material and students can access it instantly.  So, if we want to teach them something about Casablanca we could put up a ‘beat sheet’ that takes them, one by one, through the film.

 

“My feeling is that we’re heading to a virtual university world in which, people from all over the country will be able to take my class and I'll be able to share my expertise.   Currently, I can do this online in a class of 10, 12, 15 students, and I guarantee you that I could do it as well as if I were standing up at this podium and doing it right now.  They're engaged; they don't leave the classroom and they have a lot of fun doing it this way.”

 

(Monty Hudson)         “My name is Monty Hudson from the Department of Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts, UCLA Extension Performance and Entertainment Centre. Distance learning and online learning has a lot of potential for us.  We're already geared to help educate the market that has geographic and time limitations, so these sorts of tools obviously can be of great service.

 

“The presentation from Ms Burns demonstrated very well the limitations that we're dealing with, but also the potential that we see. Most of the courses we started online were screen writing courses. These have a text-based subject matter, so they are very easy to do.

 

“We're not doing many other courses, mostly due to limitations in the tools. Our courses are run like a show because if it isn’t appealing and we can't engage the student; they won’t enroll and stay enrolled.  But we are in a very competitive environment and we've got to look at how we're going to transform our business in such a way that we don't become a thing of the past.

 

“We began by outsourcing our online courses with a start-up company called Online Learning.net. We're following and monitoring what we see happening with the delivery of entertainment content on the Internet, to see how we can develop this company. 

 

“In our consultations with advisors and industry people, it seems to be clear that the entertainment content on the Internet is going through the same developmental phase that television went through many years ago.

 

“Many people feel there's going to a new form of content development that becomes feasible and saleable on the Internet, and we will follow those models in distributing and delivering our education on the Internet.  We're also looking at other forms of distance learning such as video conferencing, linkages with other institutions, because we don’t want to limit our vision and approach to just online education.

 

(Mr Kobara)   “I wanted to talk to you about what we do at UCLA with online education.

 

“Online education is really in a growth mode right now but it's still very new.  I would say, particularly in the USA, every institution in North America has an online program right now.  And, the implementation of online education in your institution is very important. It has to be customised to the way you do education, the outcomes that you expect, the way you do admissions.

 

“One critical question that faculties will have to address is, do you want to have a synchronous classroom or an asynchronous classroom? You can have the tools available, but opinion is divided between which one will be the dominant communication strategy.  When we talk about online education, it's not partly in the classroom and partly online.  That is supplementing the traditional classroom. We are now at the other end of the spectrum - the asynchronous classroom and learning network, where primarily the communication is not in real time.

 

“Our company, Online Learning, was originally founded as the Home Education Network, where we acquired the rights to UCLA Extension courses as our primary course provider. The original concept in 1994 was to be a videotape-based system.  By 1996, it was clear the company had to shift to an internet-based delivery system.

 

“The research we have done suggests we pursue the continuing education market. These are people that have obtained their degree but are required to undertake continual education by their professions and associations.

 

“Course content is a primary concern of these students and they want ‘name brands’. They are worried about fraudulent universities that take photographs of other universities and faculty members, put them online and in brochures and sell tuition. Two universities like this have recently been closed in the USA.

 

“The research also suggests the majority wanted asynchronous courses and the flexibility to be able to attend a class that fits in with their schedule.  But they also wanted to “attend class’ with other students and they also wanted to have an expert leading that conversation. So how do you instruct a cohort of students, interacting between and amongst each other but not in real time? 

 

“Not forgetting it also has to be very user-friendly. Students want customer service and not just an 1800 number. They want somebody they know the name of in the classroom who they can ask questions of.

 

“So for those institutions considering on-line education, a critical element at stake is your reputation.  Unfortunately, the prevalent mentality with many is if they offer a course, students will enroll, have a wonderful experience, and this will advance their institution, giving them the cutting edge. 

“Institutions also have to fight the inclination to put their least popular courses on line first in the hope that it will salvage them somehow. 

 

“Another major issue is intellectual copyright.  Institutions have to ensure the people paying tuition fees that they have protection when they access a class. They don’t want to be saying things in a classroom where anybody can watch.  It sounds obvious, but it's not well thought through universally. 

 

“Marketing is critical yet educational institutions are not used to it. For example, the former UCLA, which has 35,000 fulltime students, allocated $1500 to admissions to get applicants for all of its 17 schools.  It generates about 70,000 applications every year so why would they spend more money?

 

“Are they getting the right students?  What are they doing in terms of profiling who they want to add to the student body - what is the cyber-demographic profile of these people, how do we identify them and so on.  Also, what is the strategy to reach those people? This is all basic marketing. 

 

“One of the issues is how much institutions are going to charge. Our UCLA Extensions courses are a minimum 30 per cent more than UCLA charge to take the course on campus.  Institutions will need to look at regional, national and international costs and how they are evaluating the total costs.

 

“When looking at an acceptable attrition rate, institutions need to take customer service into consideration. Customers of the online education expect there will be an adapting world to met their needs. There should be standards and response times and text support.

 

“A major university worked for four years in a national program, spending $5,500,000. It released a progress report saying that because 49 per cent of their students left within the first 30 days, they needed to shorten the courses. The courses must be too long.  Incredibly, there was no customer service analysis in that document!

 

“I was asked to take a look at the future, and I think by 2004 the main issue is that online education is going to be more common place. Tools and services will be commoditised and bandwidth will no longer be a major issue.  Right now there are differences.

 

“Authentication (of students) for degree programs will be a major issue and an important obstacle for many institutions. A report by the National Education Association questioned the running outcomes of online education because there is no solid research.  However, there is a tremendous desire world wide for lifelong learning, and that is why I believe it's going to be an important part of the online education industry and category.

 

“Institutions will have to be selective in the courses they offer.  In my UCLA experience, dentistry and medical education is incredibly profitable for the schools and there are a lot of opportunities in engineering in the future.

 

“Our most popular courses include teacher courses because we know that 45 per cent of our students are teachers.  Also everybody wants to do accounting, I don't know why. And, screenwriting is very popular. One of the remarkable, but not surprising, occurrences, is the number of people with disabilities who do our courses. People with physical and geographical issues are a population that has never really been reached by universities.

 

“We feel very strongly about issues of protection of the author, intellectual property, copyright. UCLA and the faculty own that copyright. In our company we don't want to own any copyright or intellectual property, we are only concerned with our exclusive rights to distribute and deliver their content.

 

(John Colette)            “When we look at what film schools do it's not just a pedagogical business, it's also a production business.  It's a hands-on business in many senses.  Film making is a collaborative production enterprise, and what we're looking at with our trials is not just how do we teach people online, but how do we get them to collaborate in the manufacturing process using these telecommunications tools. 

 

“First, I am going to look at the traditional view of distance education, and then I'm going to talk about distributed production and collaborative production. 

 

“From 1995 there has been an increase in the opportunity to use digital technology and sending material over the web.  These enabling production technologies have had a profound effect on how we handle media.

 

“Essentially we're looking at this idea of distance learning, which is viewing a school as a pedagogical organisation that gives something to students. The way this usually operates is that we receive scripts and essays from students, and it's hosted at the film school on a World Wide Web server.  We can have text lessons, provide a structure, and the teacher can give feedback. We've had initiatives like this in universities where, for example, certain high attendance courses have been video taped so if you can’t get to the lecture, you can borrow the tape.   

 

“From the film school point-of-view, we may leap frog this and think what is it that we actually do.  What is it that we are teaching people when they come into a production process and they have to work together as a group? This is where the first collaborative production model with the cyberport trials comes together. 

 

“What we've been looking at is establishing a common group of assets, which are rushes in terms of audio or video, and essentially enhancing the post production process so you can go through two remote sites.

 

“You could have two synchronised Media 100s, with the same body of rushes and can update their cut, come online and start to discuss what they're looking at. Essentially this doesn't preclude having a personal or physical relationship with the people you’re working with, but enhances your ability to be mobile in a contemporary industrial context.  You may need to manufacture films in the future with your creative base distributed.

 

“An example is the movie Mission Impossible II, which is in pre-production in Australia with the production designer team in Spain, Los Angeles and Australia.  This is a perfect example of how you could use online communication to share files, collaborative white boarding - a virtual meeting room to share ideas very quickly. 

 

“This first example is what we call a collaborative production and the second opportunity grows out of this.  This is a model of distributed production and it's a little different to the one that I showed previously where you're using the sort of pedagogical output of the film school.  It’s saying the film school exists beyond the walls of the school. 

 

“Our problem in North Ryde, Sydney, Australia, is that we’re a 40 minute drive from the central business district. However we notice acutely our physical location in relation to our potential client groups, and the opportunity with this kind of distributed production is that we look at having a remote work station which can have video input / output, software for sound and video editing, and an amount of storage.

 

“This might be used in something like documentary production. The documentarist might send tapes back to the physical location of the school, so we retain a master archive, but they also have an offline version.

 

“Presently we send someone (on location) with a camera and they return with a number of tapes. It might be easier to produce a documentary on location over a number of months, using these telecommunications technologies to edit and update the project.  

 

“To summarise, we're looking at distance education not just at the enhanced teacher / student relationship, but also the physical assets of a film school and how these might change through telecommunications. This doesn't get rid of the need for face-to-face communication, but it starts to mirror the way the production industry will be heading over the next 10 years.

 

            (Stephanie Moore)     “I coordinate the professional programs at UCLA School of Theatre Film and Television, put in place five years ago.  The goal of the professional program was to bring students to UCLA to study screen writing that had not been able to attend the MFA program. We also thought it would increase revenue to the school.

 

            “We decided to offer the course online because we had received numerous letters from prospective students saying they would love to do the course but couldn’t move to LA.

 

            “The program takes in approximately 20 to 25 students every year and there are hundreds of applications.  Currently we have 80 students on campus taking the program and approximately 30 students online. The instructors are part of the faculty as well as working professionals in the industry.

 

            “There is a selection process for admitting our students. Each student must have a bachelor's degree and they submit a writing sample and a statement of purpose. In addition we have an advanced program, which is also offered online. After the student has been in the program for a year they are invited to come and enroll on a quarter-by-quarter basis as an advanced student. 

 

            “We are now having past students returning to take advanced sections of the course.  Students complete two feature-length screenplays during the year.  We have had terrific successes.”

 

            (Jim Schmerer)           “We have an online campus which is complete with libraries, screenplays, lounges for students to meet, classrooms and a lecture hall.  Being online, students also communicate on a daily basis where as on campus it may be a whole week before students meet again.

 

            “The other difference is that students are required to turn in their weekly assignments 36 hours before the class.  We require the students to download everybody else's assignments, so when they come into the workshops everybody has read everybody else's work and we can workshop all the material.

 

            “The workshops are chat rooms where everybody is on at the same time.  The only problem we run into with the live workshops is the different time zones with the international students. The students in Italy, for example, come to class sometime between midnight and 3am.

 

            “The other interesting thing we do is we have a verbatim transcript of a lecture.   This is because on-campus students can listen and take notes when attending a lecture on campus but online they can’t do that. They are watching a computer screen and typing. 

 

            “Although we have the program working smoothly now, the marketing is a different issue.  The people who wish to enroll in a scriptwriting course at the School of Theatre, Film and Television already have a qualification.  So they are seeking us out rather than us seeking them out.  So we don't market the School or this program as such. It is on the UCLA web site, and the Department of Theatre, Film and Television site. But that’s it.

 

            (Mr Hudson)   “We have a different approach with UCLA Extension, even though we enjoy the credibility of the UCLA reputation. Nonetheless we must go after new clientele, so we send out our catalogues and promote our departmental web site and the Extensions’ website.

 

            “We are in the process of trying to define our market.  UCLA Extension is by design and definition, there to educate people who are working. We go after national and international students as well as local and regional students. We are there to help people who have time and geographic limitations and / or disabilities to take a course by using the tool of the Internet.

 

            “However, there is no competition between the screenwriting programs in the Extension course and the School of Theatre, Film & Television, simply because the requirements to take each are different, and so are the students. 

 

            “In defining your market, I would emphasis that online learning needs to be an outgrowth of your overall institutional strategy before you think of allocating resources. We are looking at online learning in a few ways.  One is an advertising and marketing mechanism, and the other is as a delivery and distribution mechanism. You may think you need a website because the Internet is so popular, but the next question needs to be why.

 

            (Ms Moore)   “By having an offshore or interstate audience however, you have the potential to bring in further students from the additional network of current student’s friends and associates.

 

            (Mr Schmerer)  “The one thing I think we are forgetting is that no matter what technology is available, it is still dependent upon the teachers. Teachers and Professors must be trained to teach online.  It is not the same as teaching in traditional classroom setting.

 

            “Now it is true in an (online) workshop, after a while you get to know the personalities of all your students because it comes through.  They get to know yours, but you can't tell when somebody's sleeping. You can, in a traditional classroom, see them doze off.

 

            “You just don't walk from a classroom online and give a three-hour screenwriting workshop. Presently I have an instructor, who has been a teacher for many years, monitoring the class.  I am trying to get him involved and used to this new teaching style.

 

            (Mr Bayly)   “I want to return to the issue of defining your market. Tailoring your program to go after that target market. I would like to ask those who have experienced this to talk about what the set up costs were and what the operational costs are.

 

            (Ms Burns)     “I built the server that we use at UCLA with a $100 board and a $65 CPU.  I have since added an ATI Wonder Card and a Sound Blaster Live Card.  We have got to audio-stream our half-hour radio show out of that server.  So I would suspect the total cost for our program is about $1500, which includes the $200 web server.

 

            “Everything that we have ever got has been out of a mini grant. My Department has no money to do this, they are excited to do it and we get a tenure track job. I look after everything including the human resources.

 

            “When I started I was doing 16-hour days, but it’s not that bad any more. Once you learn how to do it it's not so bad and it ticks along on its own.  The website gets redone.  The most expensive thing I've got in my set up is the software I run on Windows 98.  The WebBoard and website probably cost me about $500-$600 in software.

 

            “We also found that for every UCLA Extension student who enrolls in a UC Riverside course, Extension makes money. So Extension have asked me to design a system for the writing program extension.  Which means they won't have to pay an external provider. Also our creative rights are being maintained and are not being given to a third provider to distribute. It is a model that would work for everybody here. 

 

            (Mr Brietrose)            “I have online web pages for all the classes I teach, but that's not for distance learning purposes.  It is solely a service for students who are enrolled in the classes.  The initial cost was the computer, at about $3500. I did the “sweat-equity” during my work hours. I put it together and maintain it.  This is probably around $3-3500. 

 

            “The other costs are minimal, such as the WebBoard and the HTML letters. However, I have a tech-support person on staff, which UC Riverside doesn't have. Another advantage I have is the backing of my Dean if new equipment is needed or necessary.  This turns out to be a tremendous advantage to the students and to me.   The maintenance cost is minimal.

 

            (Prof. Egan)   “Monash University has about 47,000 students.  Two years ago, we were receiving about 350,000 hits a day to our web page.  So in terms of external visibility of Monash, this is very important.  So if you regard these programs as part of your marketing effort, then you have to be careful about the standard of the programs.

 

The sort of costing that we have seen is in the order of $150,000 up to about $300,000. These are engineering programs, so there is a labour intensive simulation of layouts and environments. That being said, we have a large amount of material on the web, which is resource material to support the in-house programs, and we have been doing that for some number of years.

 

            (Mr Brietrose) “I would be interested to hear more about the Interactive CD that Rajko Grlic was discussing, and the costs to produce it. 

 

            (Prof. Grlic)     “There are two problems for us.  One is to find the money to produce, and the other is how to market it. We are also talking about something quite different from a website.  This is a product that can go on the market. The project started when I was given $65,000 for a project at Ohio University.

 

            “In the end the University put in around $200,000 and shared profit with the company who helped produce the CD Rom. It is almost impossible to put a dollar amount on this project because I was not paid, but a rough estimate would be $500,000.  The University is starting to see a return profit now, and I believe that in the end they will make their money back.

 

            “The bigger problem for us was how to find a distributor.  There are multimedia game distributors, which are separate from educational distributors. We found larger companies didn’t know what to do with our product. They said it would not fit on the educational shelf nor on in with the games.  We eventually chose an enthusiastic small distributor rather then one of these larger companies.

 

            “The question now is how do we use this now for any kind of distance learning? The University was trying last year, and I put together a syllabus, but then they decided not to. They are thinking this year it could be used in two-week long workshops, which they will offer three times a year.

 

            (Greg Egan)    “There are a number of technical issues that make this interesting to us as an engineering group.  My centre is involved in a large number of activities, including M-peg standards. We have been involved directly in the standards groups for almost a decade and have had a significant amount of input into that group.  So we know almost everything there is to know about video coding, commonly known as video-compression, which is an essential element for digital transmission of video material.

 

            We're also into network systems performance.  There are some facets of existing networks, some proposed networks, which are quite undesirable in the context that we're talking about here.  A lot of work has been done on distributed server architectures.  This is not a simple domain.  The way you structure these is quite dependent on the usage that you're going to put them to.  It's possible to spend obscene amounts of money and do it badly.

 

            “We are also working in optical communications.  This is very long haul, and it is important to networks for the future.  This is the ability to transmit information equivalent to about 20,000 high definition television station transmissions down a single fibre.  There are no repeaters, so this is a continuous fibre over something like 10,000 kilometres.

 

            “A lot of work on RF propagation, electromagnetic compatibility, which is important in large format displays and things that relate to that.  Digital signal processing.  As you go into these very high data rates we need to know all about that, and this last thing at the bottom - copyright. When we got involved I'd have to say that probably we spent about 40 per cent of the time on technical issues, but the rest was related to copyright content owners and their sensitivities to the material; how it's handled and how it's protected.

 

            “Arising out of that, we've done quite a lot of work encryption and other matters. You wouldn't really expect to see copyright listed under an electrical engineering group activity.  We have large network clusters.

 

            “We have everything from ATM networks down to radio frequency mobile, you know, what's your Dick Tracey phone and watch your latest movie on your hand-held cellular phone.  We're about to put in a satellite uplink that reaches as far as the West Coast here.  Unfortunately it doesn't reach the UK but there are other ways of getting there.  So we'd have almost every piece of kit that you could possibly imagine inside of our facilities.

 

            “In terms of the video on demand, architectures and networks have done a lot of work on user characterisation.  The models of interaction on interactive video on demand systems and the literature are fatally flawed, as is quite a lot of other stuff that just makes gross assumptions about how people behave.  To give you an example, the literature says that the probability of a rewind or a fast forward on a VCR; it's an equal probability.  I don't know when you're using a VCR whether you feel that's true, but I don't think that's true at all.

 

            “But all the literature assumes that and the modelling of some of the networks and server architectures out there is based on these false assumptions, and false assumptions on traffic behaviour and so on.  So this work has been done with the visual arts people in the Faculty of Arts at Monash and on a number of other sites to see what the behaviour is of people in that environment.

 

            “The area that we're interested in looking at is the behaviour of people on non-linear editing systems.  You know, what is the interaction that they have with non-linear - when you're using a non-linear editing system; what's the behaviour.  Because if you're looking at distributed editing systems it's very important to get a handle on that, because it has almost everything to say about how you structure the service and the networks.

 

            “Hierarchical storage systems; again, to keep costs down on these things is a very important domain.  Central to all of this is this area of distributed servers.  The networks are not going to be capable of taking information from a huge central server and sending it out to people editing at a distance. It has to be a distributed system, and the argument that I hope to put to the panel is that our educational programs need to take on board this paradigm.

 

            “Real time encryption and description is an important issue as a transition. As we go into digital television however, the issues of protection of intellectual property are a vexed one because most of the proposals in high definition television do not involve any protection of the material. So it's raw, high-quality digital material which can be stolen fairly routinely.

 

            “There were some attempts with regional encoding of DVDs to try and protect material, but that's failed.  It's been circumvented by the usual software short circuits.  Other proposals like DVX, which were encrypted DVD discs with online keys, have not been taken up, and I don't think that experiment can be conducted again. In the short term, this issue of encryption and protection is still a live one.

 

            “The final point, which you saw yesterday in the presentations, is quality of service issues.  The current Internet one is not designed to convey video or video conferencing.  There are large latencies in it that are unpredictable.  It's a best effort service.  It was the sort of service that the military wanted if everything else got nuked - eventually the mail would get through, but it makes no guarantees about timeliness of delivery or latencies on the network, and it's essentially useless in any sense at the moment.

 

            “But this will.  Internet 2 is coming and this issue of quality of service and real time performance is going to be solved over the next 12 months or so, at least at a small scale.  In the meantime, what we'll be exploring, hopefully between the group here and the groups in the UK, is looking at plain old telephone systems with end-to-end modem connections where it's all much more controlled.  Sounds really low-tech; the result is likely to be better.

 

            “We have something like 400 titles up at the moment, and our tape robots and other bits and pieces out the back, we can go up to about 1000 hours of video, and that scales up quite nicely.  The other thing in the interaction between the engineering groups and the content owners is that in the percentages of where we spent our time; I sort of broke it up 40 per cent engineering, 60 per cent copyright issues.

 

            “When we went through the coding process for these titles, we had people coming in, (including the content guardians; not always the owners directly) looking at what sort of job we were doing on the compression. In many cases they disagreed with what the objective measures said is a good thing.  So, if you're involved in a film school activity your students will need to be conscious of what is happening in these compression processes. The material is going digital, and if you produce a work of art you want to know what damage is being done to it so that you can partially accommodate that in the creative process without destroying the creative process.

 

            “But, as these systems are uniformly DVD, high definition Television, digital Television; they are all dependent on compression, and that will do things to your production which you may not find palatable.  So, these sorts of things need to bridge into your teaching programs.  You don't need to know what video coding is, but you really need to know what it's likely to do.

 

            “So the future; the whole world will essentially flirt with digital television in about two years.  In Australia this is about a year and a half away.  We tend to do things a little earlier because we're basically the experimental laboratories for the rest of the world.  We're so far away that, in the past at least, the bad news didn't get out about products.  But we also know how to use the Internet now, and it really maximises the rate at which bad news gets out of Australia.  I communicated that to a very large computer company a few years back.  They didn't believe it; put a bad product into Australia and instantly got worldwide publicity for the faults and flaws in it.  I won't say which three letter acronym it was.  There's a few that you could guess from.

 

            “DVDs are starting to take off and DVD writers are with us now.  The costs of those will fall away to a few hundred dollars shortly, so ripping off material is going to be pretty easy.  Issues such as watermarking and other things need to be considered in your production processes.  But essentially all work in progress is likely to be digital.

 

            “Once you do that, the impediments to transnational collaboration on these things go away, because you're not involved in pushing analogue material between countries.  It's just this robust digital format.  So collaborative working at a distance is going to be important.  Time-shifting; taking advantage of time zones is something that routinely goes on between Australia and the west coast here where you're working alternative shifts.

 

            “It doesn't need to take up a lot of curriculum space in your programs, but your students need to be aware of the likely impact of it. There needs to be an adoption of these distance collaborative issues in your teaching methodologies, which relates directly to this distance education theme of the conference. 

 

            (Mr Colette)   “Essentially what we're faced with is a big picture process in the way that Greg's describing it, the media that we fundamentally handle will be digital.

 

            “Martin Gardiner and Rod Bishop have both brought up a very good point, which is the people that come into our schools / institutions are not likely to need to be taught how to work an editing device.  They've probably done it at home already.  They've probably been able to edit a bit of video.  They might have learnt rhythm by using ‘slow-mo’ on a VCR.  The kind of dissection of the media and the kind of mediation that an individual can undertake on one of these machines for a few thousand dollars is pretty spectacular.

 

            “How are we going to be able to own our own intellectual property at schools.  How are we going to make that intellectual property valuable, and is our location going to be necessarily a physical one or will we have to take into account the fact that our students may be placed remotely.

 

            “We're using a hypermedia studio here at UCLA for this conference.  What kind of an effort was it to get that up and running?

 

            (Joel)   “As part of this conference we sent a 512 kilobyte stream to Monash University in Australia yesterday.  That's easy and it looks good, but right now the capacity of our Internet connections between both of those is 1000 times faster than that. The software we're using right now isn't quite up to speed however, so what we have looks good now, but if it was 1000 times better I would be excited - and it's definitely moving into that direction.

 

            “What's deceptive in most streaming situations is that the number of machines tends to aggregate quickly.  Right now it's easy to send one streaming broadcast, but to do that requires content, an encoding machine and a distribution centre.  All of a sudden it all adds up, and then you need an Internet service provider.

 

            (Mr Colette)   “You're saying that this kind of technology might be good from a point of view of distributing one lecture to many, or maybe for teleconferencing, as in a kind of mentoring situation?

 

            (Joel)  “I have an MFA in sound design, but I was very interested in being able to share the criticism of student works with the streaming process. This would allow multiple professors, who might have different viewpoints, to evaluate your work rather than being stuck with the types of criticism you might get from certain localised institutions. This is something that could be very easily done with streaming. Even a telephone in streaming would be an easy situation.

 

            (Mr Colette)   “My take on this is that we've got two kinds of interaction which are going on, and the text-based interaction where we're able to get feedback from professors.  You're going to get a written report or something that you can refer back to, and that's a little bit less temporarily based. 

 

            “So we've seen that model working. We're seeing something where we have to think what's the value of seeing a bit of facial expression and a little more of that person we know.  We get a certain amount from a phone call.  We get a certain amount, maybe more, from a videoconference, and the couple of times that I've videoconferenced I've found it better each time, but also a strange sort of tele-presence.

 

            (Mr Gardiner)   “My studio, Planet X, started off as an experiment. My first professional career was in research and development with computer systems, and I ended up working in a very Multimedia type environment before the actual term came about, and then after that I met John Lassiter at a graphics conference and a few ILM people. I then went onto film school.

 

            “I was interested in the very segregated way that film production actually went on.  You know, Steenbeck did this; the gangsync did this and everything was, like, bits and pieces of equipment and really you needed something of a couple of thousand square feet just to hold all the bits and pieces of equipment to do it.  Also you needed so many diverse skills and capabilities to do it and, as a digital engineer, I looked at these things and I could see, hang on, I could do these all in one box.

 

            “I started a masters project which is actually to set up a digital studio, and the first thing about the studio was we really just started off with basically generic PCs.  We had Silicon Graphics, MacIntosh and PCs, but they were all connected. We tried to set up a situation where every machine was as capable as every other machine. We had a server and you could just jump on a machine and load your project. When you got in strife you'd jump on everyone's desk and load up the project and some you'd have eight or nine workstations all rendering away to save you a buck to meet the deadline.

 

            “One of the real reasons for doing this wasn't so much to investigate the technology, because I thought Microsoft and Avid and all those organisations were spending billions of dollars in investigating the technology.  My real experiment was to investigate the human and the social interaction and the different type of engineers/artists that were going to be involved in this revolution and.

 

            “It's really become a very blurry line between what is an artist and what is an engineer. If you think I’m an artist and you're an engineer, you're not going to make the jump into the digital domain, because it's a very blurry line.  A lot of people also ask about what we look for when we employ people.  I don't look for a person who is a fantastic Avid operator. I don't look for a person who is particularly skilled in one craft.

 

            “We have specialists in that area, and specialists in that area, and specialists in that area, but every one of my animators, including my cell animator that spends most of his time drawing on a light box.  He can still jump into the edit suite and cut something together if he needs to. 

 

            “So we've created a different environment where you get very good peer-to-peer relationships. For example, the light box operator talks to the editor, and they're talking the same language, and if he gets frustrated he'll kick him out of the way and show him.  But it's a very different environment and that's what has really been the interesting part about setting up the digital studio.  What has come out of that as well has been trying to drag the commercial clients that we have into that domain.  A lot of them are very afraid of that, especially the advertising agency creative because a lot of them still don't operate MacIntoshes. They have operators for that. 

 

            “They don't need to understand.  They draw a little scribble and they hand it to the operator and the operator is the one who’s meant to make it look good.  I'm a bit confused because that little scribble looks nothing like what the operator churns out at the other end.  But we've dragged them into that domain. We started by doing simple things like setting up a web site for a client, putting up J-peg files and teaching them that they could print in the web browser. Then they could draw on the piece of paper and fax us back the response.  So you've got a situation where he draws a big circle and he says: "More red" or "move that from here to there" and, you know, a very tactile response, something that they could get their hands around and slowly bringing them into that domain.

 

            “One thing that's happened is remote approvals.  The example I'm thinking about is Disney where you had to have approvals from about 14 different territories from senior vice presidents, and once you get into that sort of legal operation everyone has a finger in the pie.  Working to a deadline there, you were able to actually place work for approval and comment on a web site and allow that single point to feed out to a group.

 

            “We were working on a Kodak ad with a Disney affiliation and the Disney content represented about half the ad and the big worry was the turnaround time in getting approvals. We just said: "Look, we'll put it up on the web site and we'll see how it goes."  In the space of 12 hours overnight we got 20 down loads from places. Lots were from Los Angeles, but we also had Asia, Hong Kong, and London and quite a number of different locations around the world.  What would happen is they were really happening overnight, alterations would happen that day, we'd put up the next version. 

 

            “Again we got comments and went through three iterations before the thing was finally approved.  That happened in three days.  Now, if we had to do that through Fed Express - Fed Express takes anything up to five days because for some reason the plane just sits in Sydney for a couple of days at a time.  So that could have taken three weeks to do that and yet we're able to do it in three days.  We now actually have people who are doing commercials now that may not even be doing the job with us but they will come to us and say: "Look, we've got to get this to the States, we've got to get this available.  Can you put it up on a web site for us?"

 

            “It’s like a service bureau.  The first time I saw this done in a film production was the Santa Barbara Studios, and it suffers almost as much the tyranny of distance by being in Santa Barbara as you would by being in Australia.  Because you're not within a 20-minute drive of someone in Los Angeles, you're out of the loop, and they actually use this technique to get remote approvals from their director.  It was during the production of Spawn for New Line, and they put all their animation for the day up.  The director went to Germany and his assistant would down load it on a lap-top 20 minutes before approval time and then the files were on the lap-top and so they could go through and approve the files. 

 

            “So this has been taken up by the industry.  The thing that seems to start to come out of this is that we're looking at an enabled potential client group.  We're looking at a client group who has access to the VCR.  They have access to learning the language from that and they potentially have great access to digital cameras, to basic editing systems.  The kind of server architecture you're talking about in your studio where you have a central access over a remote network.  It seems to me that if you have a student population who is enabled at that level.

 

            “Then much of their work might be undertaken out of the school, out of the building, and we're maybe not supplying kit to people.  What do you think the time frame is for that?

 

            (Mr Schonbrunn)   “I think that's a critical element to try and bring into the film school environment.  And as students become accustomed to that type of accessibility, I think that as they leave the school and go into the world the industry at large will begin really accepting this more and more.  The catch is that under no circumstances at this moment is it cheap.

 

            (Prof. Egan)   “As an example, all of our students at Monash have Internet service provider access.  The university has dispensed with direct dial-up lines, so it all goes through the ISPs.  Typically those links can be anything up to 400 kilobytes with the cable level stuff, but more typically it's probably 56 kilobytes.  So in the transition stage I guess with the cost of write-able CDs down in volume at around about $1.50 in Australia, in significant volumes - I mean the dollars are roughly comparable.  So if you've done some work in progress then it's not too much of a drama to run off 20 copies of this material on CD and let the students take it home. 

 

I think it's impossible to buy a PC now without a CD drive on it and probably within another six months without a DVD drive.  You'll have to pay extra for a CD drive I suspect.  So they can take the material home and they can use this edit decision list driven paradigm and then come back inside the school and do the post production and all that sort of stuff.  I think it's a hybrid thing the transitions are very, very rapid and it's not a problem.  It's all stock standard technology.

 

            “I just fell over backwards with how much of an editing system is built into the PC you can buy for $1000 at the local supermarket.  So things are certainly - from a point of view of the future you're going to have a more literate and more experienced, completely au fait production based client that's going to be coming into the school. 

 

            “Really what you have to be teaching them is the artistic skills of why does the thing I shoot my home videos with look like a piece of crap, then working out the best way to teach that.  Some of those solutions will be a CD, some of those may be on line, and a lot of those will still be you stick a camera in a person's hand and you stick a metal tripod underneath the camera and you bag it and you set up the lights.  So that it really boils down to what you are teaching. 

 

            “The perennial problem is that we're now in a situation where most of the students have better computers at home than we can possibly afford.  So what we are moving to is having very wise companies donating equipment to us on a regular basis and directing our funds elsewhere.  I think that's being tried in other schools around the place.  But on a statistically invalid sample of my own family - kids range from 16 down to 10 years old - they routinely use a tool which has been on my Mac at home for a couple of years now which is Avid Cinema.  And so they cut their own videos, they've been doing that for some time.

 

            “They use a product called Peak which is a sound editing facility.  They've been doing some things that we wouldn't support strongly. The reality is the kids are sucking down MP3 files, taking CDs that they bought at the shops and dropping it into the MP3 and coders on the desktop, and then it's up on their web site.  This whole process is going on and the students that are going to be coming into the film schools in a couple of years' time and if they start to see some of the kit that you've currently got they're going to say: "Well, what is this?  We've been doing distributed productions with our mates by shipping around sound files and movies and stuff since we were in primary school.  So what are we doing here?"

 

            “So you really need to rethink about what are the core set of values that you're actually putting forward in the school and how can you make that current at least in the view of the students that are coming in.  I mean it's just roaring down upon us.  And this is not tomorrow's technology, the stuff that I've got at home has been there for a couple of years, three years.” 

 

            (Mr Schonbrunn)   “It's a big internal conflict.  I am trying to teach modern skills with current equipment knowing that it's going to be outdated very soon or do we focus more on the process.  You have to find a middle line somewhere, but if you only emphasise the current technical skills you're definitely going to lose.

 

            “A 25-year-old who comes into the school will know how to operate editing equipment or knows what an EDL is. That is one of the difficulties we face, to provide context for the production and to somehow look at how we add value and enrich that process.  Even if you are starting to take people in to produce a distributable learning environment where students can, perhaps, perform some of these functions remotely, we have to work out how we characterise ourselves as organisations which can maintain the integrity of that knowledge that we've always taught because, you know, all of the schools here have had movieolas, Steenbecks and Avids, and in the end were only judged by the slap-in-the-chest of the products we make.

 

            (Robert Rosen)           “There are many reasons why the idea of film schools getting involved in distance learning is a bad one. One reason is, the pedagogy is dubious in many instances, lacking the plenitude and collective experience of face-to-face classroom encounter. Also, the technology as it now stands is questionable. Some of the available products are marginally fraudulent and the financial return is uneven. More than that, complacency seems to be an acceptable and correct attitude with film schools.

 

            “However, we know with absolute certainty the technology will be there. The fraudulence will be responded to by brand names that have some degree of credibility. With the financial return, I think it is safe to say the issue of life-long learning using media will be a dominant part of our culture in the future, and there is an enormous amount of money that's going to be made from it.  As for the complacency, it seems to me there are two choices film schools have.  The first choice is do you want to own it or lose it and if the decision is not made soon it'll be too late.

 

            “We've had indications that the area of media education is one in which claims are being made from people who run two-day film schools through to large multi-billion dollar corporations. Ultimately the only question is, will the brand name be ours coming out of the film school or someone else’s?  One could run the risk that film schools may very well in the future come to be viewed as quaint remnants from the past.

 

            “The second question is if you want to own it, what do you want to own?  The decisions are several but one is the mission that we've always had which is training creative artists and storytellers who use sound and image.  There seems to be three broad areas where a decision is made in the distance learning field. One is, do you want to become involved in the area of training / retraining, which opens you to the world of professionals.  The second area has to do with empowerment.  The third is audiovisual literacy, which applies to everyone.  The notion being that audiovisual literacy is as critical as any other kind of literacy in the education process.

 

            “If you decide to become involved, the question is “become involved in what?” If you want to move beyond training our artists better, it is into retraining professionals.  If you want to move beyond this, it is into the political-social domain of empowerment, and if you want to move further beyond, it is into the area of audiovisual literacy within the culture.

 

            “And, it’s not simply a tool to extend beyond the classroom to more people at a distant site. In thinking through this, I will take into account the three areas that have, are and will continue to transform the entertainment business as a whole.

 

             “The first is globalisation.  No longer do we talk on a national level.  The second is industrial convergence. It's very hard to talk about film without talking about television, theme entertainment, sports or publishing, and what that means to the nature of education and who you deliver it to.  The third is the digital and telecommunications revolution and what that has transformed.

 

            “I think the notion that digital technologies are viewed as a tool toward other creative goals is correct but insufficient.  The technologies themselves also open up new expressive possibilities that begin to transform the very nature of the product you're turning out.

 

            “I view this meeting as either to assist film schools with developing a strategy or to find yourselves on the wrong side of the curve reacting to circumstances that are created totally outside of our control.

            (Rod Bishop)  “I completely agree that film schools need to develop a strategy. The technological revolution will change the very nature of the way we think about education. 

 

            “With our industries changing through new technologies, it becomes necessary for our schools to think about taking a proactive role.  This means examining our client base, looking at whom we currently serve and whom we might serve in the future.  Most of us are engaged in the full-time education of film and television students.  The possibility for new delivery systems for distance education suggests a number of other markets.

 

            “The most obvious market is the students who aren’t selected into our current full-time programs. A similar group would be those who don't get into the extension programs of UCLA, or the short course programs in Australia and Britain.  A third group I would suggest is industry workers who either need to be trained or retrained, and the ability to be able to learn at home would be of great benefit.

 

            “The other group is the adolescents who are technologically adept at very young ages now.  I can see some of those adolescents bypassing film school. I can see them being able to post their folios on the Internet to the industry and say, “here I am, look at how clever I am with this stuff, employ me”.

 

            “We will always get students in our film schools, it's whether we get the best of them that concerns me. This ‘adolescent’ group may lose interest in going to a film school but still want to go into the industry. We can provide them with an enhanced folio with film culture and the craft skills.  The people that we have in our schools possess those skills and if we can find a way to get those on line we will obviously enlarge our clientele and our market.

 

            “Then, of course, the other group is the every-day citizen who decides they want to be filmmakers.  Some of these people turn out to be very good.  We recently had a student in Australia, Brad Haywood, who had produced a low-budget feature called Occasional Coarse Language.  Brad met with an Australian producer, Tristram Miall, who is also Chair of the Council of our School, about ways to get financing.  During the meeting, Tristram asked him how he had learned to make films and Brad said at AFTRS. Tristram replied that he did not know he was a student there.  Brad said that he wasn’t, and that what he had done was to read every book on film making in the AFTRS library, then he worked his way through every video that he thought was important and snuck into the back of classes.

 

              “That kind of resourcefulness is obviously to be applauded, but it also shows that when you're looking for highly motivated people to enroll in your schools, someone like Brad Haywood is clearly the sort of person we should be looking for. So there are people out there that we all know could fit in this category.

 

            “One thing that we haven't we discussed to a great extent is the necessity for schools to look to engineers to develop collaborative software tools for online production? We haven't been able to ascertain whether anybody is developing a software tool that will intercede into a data transfer and allow you to edit a film online and allow people on different locations to join together in editing a film. I don't see that research and development coming out of the industry, so therefore the logical place it should be coming from is the film schools, in conjunction with engineering and other support help to develop those tools.”

 

            (Peter Wollen)            “I’d like to talk about the elements of teaching that will need to be considered with distance learning.

 

            “One is to develop a system that allows the person to teach with their entire sensory self.  My observation is that only 10-15 per cent of students’ learning is from what you say, and a large percentage is from how you conduct yourself. By that I mean they learn from your rhythms, the way that you put ideas together and narrate them, where you pause, where you wait for your own sense to emerge before you convey it.

 

            “The conclusion I have come to from this conference is that first we (at UCLA) have to get our in-house program renovated before we go global. Issues include students with homework stations and the kind of interactivity and teaching situations that can go on there.  Also, the different kinds of collaborative work, pedagogy and curriculum structure need to be right first before we move on to distant learning.

 

            (Bob Weis)      “I'd like to put some opposing views forward to what I've just heard. I would like to give an example about what happens with brand name.  Encyclopedia Brittanica lost their number-one status as the leading encyclopedias in the world when they weren’t quick enough to take up Bill Gates’ offer of a partnership. Gates then invented Encarta, which is now the biggest installed base of encyclopedias in the world.  Brittanica has changed hands three times since that conversation. 

           

            “Organisations have to look at not just transporting existing assets, but adding value and working out how to make them accessible.  I think the example we could all learn from is the failure of the majority of CD-ROM projects, where people took static, existing knowledge and placed on a disc without consideration for the navigational tools that were required to make it easily accessible. “