Imagine being a film student and heading off to school knowing you could run into a top filmmaker like Jim Sheridan or a DOP ace like Paul Sarossy. That is a possible scenario for Sheridan College students following the January opening of the institute’s Centre for Real-time Production, located at Pinewood Toronto Studios.

The $2.3 million grant Sheridan is receiving from the federal government’s College and Community Innovation Program to bankroll the center will be distributed over five years. The choice to locate the center at a real film studio was based on previous outings.

‘It’s been an unbelievable experience – students doing their own films with major productions happening around them, with cinematographers, set designers and various production people walking off the big sets into our space, and the next thing you know students are engaged in great conversations. It’s just such a buzz,’ says Sandy McKean, associate dean of Sheridan’s School of Animation, Arts and Design.

The Real-time center will focus on researching digital workflow and new image-capture technology in production and post. The facility offers a 5,000-square-foot studio and 1,400 square feet of office and lab space with post-production and CG animation stations.

In addition to chance professional encounters at Pinewood, the center will offer more formalized co-mingling with industry through partnerships with FilmOntario, IATSE Local 667 and the Directors Guild of Canada Ontario. Filmport committed early, and when management of the mega-studio changed over to Pinewood, the new operators remained on board.

Initial financial support came in the form of $300,000 from the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Entertainment and Creative Cluster Partnerships Fund, which goes toward one specific research area. In this case, that was pre-visualization – using gaming technology for motion-capture to plan scenes and setups in games and films.

But Sheridan wanted to also address new technological and business models in 2D and 3D imaging, color management and virtual cinematography. So it applied for the CCI program, which helps schools boost their technological research capacity in various fields to help local industry.

As part of the project’s mandate, the college is mindful of the center’s potential benefit to Ontario companies with small production and research budgets. It will be ‘taking the sort of things that have been done on Avatar and looking at how you bring that down to a domestic industry in Ontario,’ says Sheridan professor John Helliker, faculty lead on the project.

Sheridan is also looking at long-term advantages. ‘We will be taking the learning from this research and applying it back into our curriculum, which will then prepare our students as the next generation of workers,’ says McKean.

The center will be open to Sheridan students doing internships as well as those in Sheridan programs throughout the academic year.