NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts will become one of the first institutions to offer a one-year master’s degree program in virtual production starting next fall.
The program — which was co-developed by film technologies director Rosanne Limoncelli and Tisch professor Sang-Jin Bae — will be located at the Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center in Brooklyn. The center, set to open next year, will include television studios, control rooms and an LED volume stage, allowing actors to engage with live visual effects on a single stage.
To create these stages, Tisch partnered with Lux Machina Consulting, a company that creates virtual production and display technologies.
“This is a new version of a lot of different filmmaking techniques, and we need more people who know how to do it,” Lux Machina president of operations Zach Alexander said in an interview. “My hope would be that this stage offers a lot of opportunity for folks who are in the program.”
The center’s technology has been used to create films and shows including “Barbie,” “The Mandalorian” and “House of the Dragon.” Roxy Moskowitz, a second-year in Tisch’s graduate film program, emphasized the need for a program at NYU that focuses on modern filmmaking techniques.
“It’s very interesting, because when I initially heard about the technology that they used in ‘The Mandalorian,’ it seemed just really expensive — kind of out of the grasp,” said Tisch junior MK Tasker-Lewis. “You have to be an established filmmaker or a person in the industry in order to access it and use it.”
The first cohort will comprise 24 students who will take part in lectures and workshops covering a variety of subjects, including technical direction, art direction and production design. They will also take a seminar focusing on the writing, directing and visual storytelling aspects of filmmaking.
“We want to train these people and train as many underrepresented filmmakers as we can and get them into the industry, working in these jobs, before all these jobs get full,” Limoncelli said. “Everyone’s going to learn a little bit of everything.”
Correction, Oct. 17: A previous version of this article misattributed a quote said by MK Tasker-Lewis. The article has been updated to reflect this correction, and WSN regrets the error.
Contact Aashna Miharia at [email protected].
