anjolametews: Kitchener digital media cluster gathering momentum

KITCHENER ? Marcel O?Gorman?s voice echoes in the old post office as he walks through the latest cutting-edge addition to the downtown?s growing digital media cluster.

?This is going to be a display area,? O?Gorman says of the area just inside 44 Gaukel St. that is flooded with natural light.

O?Gorman heads the University of Waterloo?s critical media lab, and he helped bring together The Kitchener Studio Project in this city-owned building in the core.

City council is on board, so is the college and the University of Waterloo has approved it in principle.

Art and technology will come together in this building and some of the best work will be exhibited in the display area. At the back of the building, off the loading dock, the Creative Enterprise Initiative will have low-cost studio space for artists.

There is 10,000 square feet of space on the first floor of the building that will be filled with students and faculty from the area?s three post-secondary institutions ? The School of Media and Design from Conestoga College, the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University.

Christie Digital, the local company that makes digital projectors, and Communitech, the industry association for the area?s high-tech firms, is also part of the studio project.

O?Gorman oversees the graduate students doing a master?s in experimental digital media ? XDM for short.

?The collaboration with Conestoga is a great fit,? O?Gorman says. ?I can see our students finishing an XDM degree for example and then doing a post-grad program for a summer, or one-year program in 3-D animation.?

The digital-media sector needs creative people for animation and graphics, music, storytelling, photography, (both video and still), editing-digital video and designing hardware. And that?s where the Kitchener Studio Project comes in.

Communitech is based at The Hub in the former Lang tannery building at Charles and Victoria streets. Startup companies head there with good ideas. They are provided space for working in, mentors, legal advice and marketing expertise.

?A huge part of this is collaboration with Communitech,? O?Gorman says. ?When they get the applications from all the people who want to be startups and be part of The Hub, they are going to look at some of them and say: ?These people would benefit from being in a creative environment.? So they are going to send them over to Gaukel.?

And some students studying experimental-digital media at the Kitchener Studio Project will come up with ideas that could be used in a startup. O?Gorman is amazed that some of his students last fall developed an app that simulated dementia. They were working with an Alzheimer?s research group at the time.

?It was a pretty good simulation,? O?Gorman says. ?It could be used by health-care providers, or people taking care of loved ones to give them a sense of what if feels like to have Alzheimer?s.?

But when the class was over the students moved on and the app was shelved. Now, with the collaboration with Communitech, the same students could be steered into a startup.

?We can get some advice on how to market that, how to commercialize it, so that?s pretty cool,? O?Gorman says. ?If there are students who want to do that, and I know there are, we have to provide an avenue to do that.?

Graduating students from The Kitchener Studio Project will be good candidates for working in one of the biggest creative fields in the world ? gaming. The developing and marketing of computer games is bigger than Hollywood.

EA, or Entertainment Arts, is one of the largest gaming companies in the world. It has an office in downtown Kitchener, mainly for the technical end of creating games. O?Gorman hopes the studio project can change that.

?We would like to see EA bring in a design project, actually a whole gaming project where the game gets developed from beginning to end,? O?Gorman says.

That requires creative writers, conceptual designers, graphic artists, animators and sound specialists, among many others.

Some of his students graduate and get hired as ?digital creatives.? O?Gorman just about chokes on his wrap in a vegetarian restaurant when he says that.

?Here is where the English prof winces, ?creative? has been turned into a noun,? O?Gorman says.

Some ?digital creatives? make interactive displays for museums in a field known as ?interaction design.?

O?Gorman wants the contemporary art festival CAFKA, the new-music festival Open Ears and the artistic-hacker-makers at KWartzLab involved in the space. The Creative Enterprise Initiative is committed and will transform the area off the loading dock into low-cost studios.

Heather Sinclair, the head Creative Enterprise, says the CEI Dock will be a working space for artists year-round. Details on how artists can apply for space will be rolled out soon.

Sinclair says the move fits perfectly with her organization?s action plan to increase capacity for arts-and-culture production by making strategic investments that support it.

?CEI is excited to collaborate on the Kitchener Studio Project,? Sinclair says. ?We are delighted to be working with the partners in the space.?

So is Paul Salvini, the chief technology officer for Christie Digital. The local company makes digital projectors and was behind 48-frame-per-second projectors showing The Hobbit. It is all about creating the technology for shared, visual experiences.

Christie built The Cave inside The Tannery. It is a small room that people enter wearing special 3-D glasses, becoming immersed in the images projected on the walls around them.

?So our interest is in simply building the capacity within the region for creative potential in terms of creating amazing-digital-media experiences,? Salvini says. ?All of those things require content and they require skilled individuals to be able to create shared visual experiences that are compelling.?

The Stratford Institute, UW?s campus there, focuses on the business end of digital media. The university and college?s computer scientists-engineers-programmers are into the technical end. Now, the college?s School of Media and Design will take the lead in the creative end.

?I think when those three worlds come together, when technology and business and design come together, that?s when really great things are going to happen and new opportunities will be formed within the region,? Salvini says.

Anyone who?s read Steve Jobs biography knows how the founder of Apple was obsessed with design and the end-user?s experience. Salvini says the studio project should add depth to the region?s design capabilities.

?I think we have all seen examples when we?ve had some technology, but for whatever reason it falls short of our expectations,? Salvini says. ?Either the design isn?t great from a usability point of view or that it?s functional but it?s not that esthetically pleasing.?

Christie was among the first companies to get behind the Canadian Digital Media Network that was created at The Hub several years go.

The City of Kitchener kicked-started the digital-media cluster in the downtown with a grant of $30,000. Later the city invested $500,000 in it and Communitech used that money to raise another $107 million.

Iain Klugman, the head of Communitech, says the small-and-medium sized companies that belong to the association had a combined economic impact of $1 billion last year and that is quickly growing.

?We are seeing just an unprecedented rate of startup activity,? Klugman says. ?We are seeing on average two new companies a day going through our intake process ? it?s a bit overwhelming.?

The startups are creating digital products for everything from crowd-funding apps, English as a second language trip advisers and a one-stop list of apartments for rent.

The Kitchener Studio Project will be another important piece in the digital-media cluster, he says.

?These kind of collaborative ventures are really powerful and it?s really cool to see,? Klugman says.