On a long shelf that runs alongside a hallway on the main floor of the CMU College of Make-Up, Art and Design, the ghastly heads of ghouls, wolverines and zombies peer out at visitors, a testimony to the institution’s craft. Inside the school’s workshop, instructor David Scott is overseeing students in the character design class, as they get their hands dirty carving details into clay models. One student is sculpting a phoenix hybrid, melding a version of the mythical creature with an unusual modern-day bird. Scott himself has a number of unfinished pieces on a centre table, one a mould of a female face with protruding ears, another a sea creature with a mermaid-like body, bulbous froggy eyes and an octopus’ suction-cupped tentacles wrapped around the entire form.

Imagination and artistry mixed with creative wizardry are key to the success of the creature design program, which has been a focus at CMU since it opened its doors over two decades ago. Today the school occupies the former home of Toronto’s Second City on Lombard Street in downtown Toronto, which it took over in 2012.

It releases some 130 students into the film and TV (among other disciplines) wilds every year – but the ability to sculpt and create startling, yet believable, creatures may not be enough to arm students as they enter an industry in the midst of disruption. Given the pressures on production budgets, many colleges, universities and institutes – CMU included – are finding ways to adapt curricula or introduce programs that arm graduates with a diverse skillset and portfolio as they enter the modern production economy.

There is no question in Jean Desormeaux’s mind that the educational institution – as a collective entity – is lagging behind as producers adopt new technology to advance the pace, design and reach of their productions.

“The transmedia reality is very real,” says the professor of advanced television and film at Sheridan College, where the idea has been introduced as a core component of its film programs. By transmedia, Desmormeaux is referring to training students to develop multiplatform storytelling skills that will enable them to think, develop and produce work in several formats at once.

This year, after three years of conception and development regulatory review, the college has successfully added a new program to its list of offerings. Massive, which stands for Music Applied to Stage, Screen and Interactive Visual Environments, is an interdisciplinary music composition and supervision course that will support Sheridan’s animation, music theatre, gaming and live-action programs.

The course was developed to respond to what Desormeaux calls a missing element in Sheridan’s offering. In the past, film and TV students would have to go out into the community and hire a composer to write music for each piece of work. But it became evident to his team that the school could help cultivate an entire generation of multimedia music composers, trained to compose for a variety of genres.

The college researched similar programs stateside, specifically those supporting Hollywood, and emerged with a one-year, three-term post graduate program accepting 20 students and beginning in May this year.

Meanwhile at CMU, a private, post-secondary institution, which faces fewer bureaucratic hurdles and can respond quicker to change, a similar hybrid program has been introduced. The school, already strong in practical make-up effects, saw it needed to incorporate a technical aspect into its offering. “We started to think about the kind of skillsets that our type of students might need in the future,” explains Barry Patterson, president of CMU.

Enter the new Digital Makeup Effects Artist Program, a 17-week accelerated program that will see 20 to 22 students walk away with both traditional hand-modeling skills and digital sculpting skills using ZBrush, a widely used software among industry professionals. And to make sure students are being exposed to a technology increasingly being used on productions, the program also incorporates an introduction to 3D scanning and printing through a partnership with Steve Cory, president of Objex Unlimited, a Toronto-based 3D design and printing shop. “Here was an opportunity to create a program where you can teach someone to be a physical sculptor but also know how to do that digitally,” Patterson explains. “We need artists who both understand creativity and art, and who also understand the digital world.”

There are also real production-side benefits. Scott, who will teach the new CMU special effects program, points to numerous examples of setbacks during filming caused by a disconnect between the artistic and technical aspects of the work. “It’s particularly useful for low and middle-budget productions in the horror genre,” he says, pointing to pre-production support that a combined skillset brings to the set.

The efforts at both CMU and Sheridan point to a changing world where a marriage of artistic strengths with technical knowhow will benefit both the producer (combined skillset, less additional costs and procedure) and the artist (multidisciplinary skillset).

While specialized programs like the hybrid options being offered by CMU and Sheridan are specific to film and TV production, they also open up options for graduates to join new media companies or game companies, both of which have high demand for talent and are flourishing in Canada thanks to financial incentives.

But not all educators feel the need to respond to trends in the industry to drive their education model. Stephen Heatley, head, department of theatre and film at the University of British Columbia, said his program’s focus is simply on good storytelling. “Obviously we update our technology (film, to video, to Red) but a good shot is a good shot on all of those formats, and we would hope that we’re teaching how to take a good shot first and foremost, and then getting our students access to the technology they want to use secondary to that.”

In the UBC program students are directed to sites like Lynda.com or to YouTube tutorials to keep up to date with technology trends.

However, UBC’s 400-level film production course is responding to the diversification of Telefilm’s funding allocations towards more web-based projects. While theatrical distribution remains a core focus, Telefilm invests $2 million of grant money in supporting emerging filmmakers through the four-year old Micro-Budget Production Program, which focuses on content that can be accessed on digital platforms. Over the past three years any grants that it accepts for its larger $60 million fund must include a multi-platform distribution strategy to achieve maximum reach.

Heatley says that UBC’s production course is also incorporating more material on digital distribution so as not to focus solely on traditional theatrical screening models.

One place that has made sizeable curriculum changes to reflect the new world of media is Centennial College’s Film and Television Business program, a one-year post graduate program in its School of Communications, Media and Design.

The program’s dean, Jeannette Loakman, says she was keenly aware the school wasn’t preparing students for the production world with a dual skillset: understanding and executing productions for both traditional and digital media. So when she took over the program last year, she revised the curriculum to include digital production.

Launching in pilot last year and officially being included in the curriculum this fall, the revised program will see 16-to-20 students learn how to shepherd a TV or film production through from start to finish in tandem with learning the fundamentals of digital media production. That means wrapping their heads around what Loakman calls, the “paperwork and money” aspects of traditional and new media projects: differing terminology; the science of tax credits for both kinds of productions; changing government regulations; how to access funding; understanding new global distribution models; and global coproductions.

At Humber College’s film and television program, coordinator Michael Glassbourg says the program is continuously evolving to meet the industry’s multiplatform needs, but argues schools need to be teaching hard and soft skills to ensure students are prepared to succeed in the real world.

“If you’re making a film and you’re hoping to get it into festivals, you have to understand the big screen platform but you also have to know that people will watch it on a laptop and a cell phone,” he says. But, he adds, although those seem the most obvious areas to prep students for, what producers struggle most with is finding people with strong interpersonal skills.

“You can teach camera, lighting, after-effects. But how do you teach empathy and good listening?”

This article originally appeared in Playback magazine’s Summer 2016 issue