Academic and cultural institutions are embracing digital media all across Canada.

Schools and professional media centers from Halifax to Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto agree that the digital revolution has arrived. Still, nagging questions remain. What exactly is digital media? And how exactly will it affect TV, film and communications in the coming years?

For Sam Fisher, associate film professor at Halifax’s Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), the answers are clear. ‘As far as I’m concerned, new media is ‘the media.’ I don’t think people will be making film – in the traditional sense – that much longer. The writing is on the wall.’

Ana Serrano, director of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, isn’t so sanguine. ‘In just the last two years alone, there has been a stampede towards new media by the traditional industries in a way that I can only describe as being chaotic. The economic promise is being seen south of the border and Canadians are trying to move into that sphere, but they’re not sure what they should be doing.

‘On the one hand, you’ve got a slew of post-graduate degrees cropping up across the country, from the Masters of Digital Media program in Vancouver through OCAD [Ontario College of Art and Design] in Toronto to NSCAD in Halifax. At the same time, however, all the Canadian broadcasters are killing their new media departments. It makes it difficult to read what’s happening here.’

One thing is clear. Everybody wants to buy the latest digital equipment. Both Fisher and Brenda Longfellow, dean of film studies at York University, hope to acquire the Red One, a state-of-the-art digital camera that is capable of recording resolutions of up to 4520 X 2540 when using a Super 35-sized CMOS sensor.

At NSCAD, according to Fisher, ‘we use film with our younger students and progress to digital equipment in senior years. It’s all flipped. Our senior students only use digital; they don’t even use tape.’

Longfellow, who heads up a film department filled with such award-winning directors and cinematographers as John Greyson and Ali Kazimi, says that ‘we see ourselves moving wholly into HD in the next few years.’

Out west, the future is now. The Masters of Digital Media program was launched this fall though a consortium of four learning centers: University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Dr. Gerri Sinclair, the executive director of the program, is thrilled by the transformation of the old Finning warehouse close to downtown Vancouver ‘into a state-of-the-art center for digital media. The whole design is based on a 3D grid, so when you come in, you think you’re going into The Matrix.’

Over $40 million has been put into the program, the building and the equipment as an economic development investment by the province. Industry affiliates that will mentor students in employment programs between first- and second-year courses include NBC/Universal, IBM Canada, 2D and 3D designers Autodesk, Bell Canada, entertainment software giant Electronic Arts and Microsoft.

Sinclair adroitly sets the scene on campus. ‘The students are each given a state-of-the-art laptop and a camera because they’re documenting their experience all the time. We have a really powerful render farm. The whole building was built on multi-modular principles of design. I call it multi-modal jack-in capability…no matter where you are in the building, you have access to power and audiovisual projection and network.’

Montreal’s Institut national de l’image et du son (aka INIS) is just as business-oriented as Masters of Digital Media, with both focusing attention on the bourgeoning gaming industry. But like Toronto’s CFC, INIS still regards film training as its core activity.

Michel Desjardins, executive director of INIS, points out that its program concentrates on ‘the practical aspects of directing actors, of how to approach a story, rather than technical support or visual effects.’

Like the CFC, the students, who are already professionals, generally make short narratives or documentaries. Desjardins is quite pleased that the INIS-produced feature film Le Ring, about a young boy who wants to be a wrestler, has been picked up for distribution by Christal Films.

Slawko Klymkiw, the CFC’s executive director, echoes the importance of storytelling, particularly in conjunction with digital media advances. ‘It’s all about the script; even our interactive piece had that emphasis.’

The piece he is referring to is Late Fragment, an interactive feature (slated for a spring release on DVD by Mongrel Media) coproduced by the CFC and the National Film Board. One of its producers, the CFC’s Serrano, agrees that storytelling is fundamental. Still, it bothers her that ‘people in traditional industries don’t get it. They find it difficult to see new media as an expression in its own right. For them, it’s just a series of enabling technologies for the film and TV industries.’

At least for the foreseeable future, despite radical changes in equipment, traditional forms of narrative will hold sway at campuses from NSCAD’s film program to York’s, and certainly at the CFC and INIS.

The true digital revolution – with its emphasis on nonlinear narrative and cross-disciplinary collaborations – is still being fought in the trenches of academia and professional media training centers.