Sunday, September 18, 2011
Event Report: UNCSA’s Entertainment Innovation Conference
TheatreFace: Last week I attended the EIC hosted by University of North Carolina School for the Arts (UNCSA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They brought together specialists from Cirque du Soleil, their technical support vendors Stage Technologies, Philips Vari-Lite, CooLux, CM Entertainment Hoists, and Meyer Sound, and business partners Carnival Cruise Lines.
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3 comments:
UNCSA's EIC sounds like a great learning opportunity. However, I was surprised after following the link to the EIC website that the conference is only for three days. The article mentions that there are so many presentations that there isn't time to attend them all. For a setup this large, why not extend EIC and let everyone get the full experience? I'm not sure about everyone else, but I know I wouldn't want to miss anything, especially with the opportunity to learn from industry leaders in entertainment technology.
I found it interesting that Cirque du Soleil expects new members to "come to them well-trained, but ready to forget everything and (re)learn the Cirque way anew." I'm curious as to what Cirque does differently from other companies like them.
Overall the conference seems like an amazing time. I was especially intrigued by the use of iPhones and iPads to control sound. I suspect that soon iPad apps will be built specifically for theatrical sound. The iPad is just a very useful piece of technology and I'd love to see how the industry could use it.
I do see a lot of value in this type of programming, but as Will mentioned, why only three days? It makes me wonder why at all. Not quite a master class, not a weekend workshop. It sounds like breadth versus depth. Aside from the few hands-on learning opportunities I do not see much of a difference. This seems very USITT-esque but without the student-to-student networking opportunities and fewer vendors.
Do UNCSA students not learn about media servers or automation without this conference event? I imagine they do (being a premier university for technical theatre arts) so is this resource use for bragging rights and exclusive networking?
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