Showbiz U

[Times photos: Cherie Diez] Tim Kotzman, 20, of Bloserville, Pa., directs the raising of stage lights for a concert setup during a class at Full Sail Real World Education, a two-year college built around the entertainment industry.

By DAVE SCHEIBER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 17, 2003

Full Sail college offers intensive training for those whose entertainment dreams unfold behind the scenes: They love the hands-on work that creates the magic.

WINTER PARK -- One class takes place in a cavernous building that could pass for a concert hall.

But there are no rows of seats or spectators, only several dozen casually clad college students who look like a typical rock-show road crew.

They hover around a huge stage, rigging banks of lights overhead and raising a thousand pounds' worth of speakers into the air on motorized chains.

Instructors watch every move. In a few hours, the students will be graded on how well they have learned to produce a major rock 'n' roll show, even though the featured acts are local bands serving as class guinea pigs.

Across University Boulevard, in a sprawling complex of modern glass buildings, another class is in session. Students sit at a million-dollar mixing console, scrutinizing a scene from Shrek on a large flat-screen monitor.

The assignment: remove a six-minute chunk of dialogue and sound effects from a cacophonous action scene, then replace it with their own audio track. For a good grade, the group's material must match the sequence as seamlessly as if it had been mixed in Hollywood.

At an adjacent shopping center, a space big enough to hold a department store has been transformed into an indoor movie soundstage. A film and video production class is in progress, with a cluster of teens and 20-somethings shooting a scene on an elaborate set they designed and built.

Aaron Gaines, 20, of Portland, Ore., creates a clay-rock monster during an object perspective class.

Down a long hallway, a handful of students puts finishing touches on small monster action figures sculpted from modeling clay. The cartoonish creations will eventually be replicated on screens as part of a computer animation class.

Meanwhile, laptop screens in other classrooms have been flashing with video games, all conceptualized and built by majors in game design.

It seems too cool for school. But this is business as usual at Full Sail Real World Education, a two-year college built around the entertainment industry.

The campus is fittingly in the shadow of Orlando's entertainment world. But in the education world, Full Sail is at the intersection of traditional college and the MTV generation.

It has a student body weaned on pop culture: music videos, rock concerts, computer games and the '90s boom of cable TV and movies.

And it is a school where a B.S. is, well, B.S.

"The entertainment industry doesn't respect degrees. It doesn't matter if you have an associate of arts, a bachelor's or a master's," says Full Sail president Garry Jones, the first employee hired in 1979 by school founder John Phelps.

"On day one, when you walk onto the set of a motion picture, when you walk into a studio where an album is being recorded, what the director or engineer wants to know is this: Can you fulfill the task that I need done?

"And that's where we come in."

Full Sail derives its name from a simple metaphor.

It wants students who long to work in the entertainment business. If they arrive with their "sails" up, marketing director Andrew Solberg says, "we'll give you the wind and energy and power to propel you at optimum speed."

That translates into teachers who have worked in the business and train students on current industry equipment, such as Pro Tools music production workstations, Avid digital editing machines and the same 144-channel mixing boards found in Los Angeles and New York recording studios. There's also a 30-person placement department to help graduates land jobs.

You don't go to Full Sail if you want to be the next Avril Lavigne or Justin Timberlake. You go so you can learn to work the soundboard for them at a concert or in the studio.

Walls in Full Sail's recording arts building are lined with gold and platinum records that its graduates have worked on as engineers: for Stevie Wonder, Creed, Robert Palmer, Joan Osborne and many others. Two have won Grammys.

Garry Jones, president of Full Sail Real World Education, says the entertainment industry recognizes people who can get the job done, not academic degrees.

Full Sail alumni have gone on to work in support positions in other entertainment fields as well, including technical director at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic studio, stage manager for magician David Copperfield and interface programmer for the Madden NFL and NASCAR 2003 video games.

Full Sail isn't the only entertainment school around. But it is well-known in the industry.

"Everybody who comes out of Full Sail has a good foundation to step into studio work," says Kevin Dillon, who runs Gloria Estefan's Crescent Moon Studios in Miami.

Dillon employs a half-dozen Full Sail graduates as assistant engineers. "I've found that people from Full Sail have made the commitment to a career path. They're very focused, and you need to be to succeed in this industry," he says.

"The Full Sail students we get are ready for an internship. They come prepared and have learned enough to start a career in TV and film," says Constantin Preda, production coordinator of Nickelodeon's Slimetime Live. "The students are trained on cutting-edge equipment, so they're technically oriented, and that's a great starting point. But they've also done things like make short 35-millimeter films, so they can work on directing and script supervision."

Preda likes the passion he has seen from Full Sail students:

"They have a strong desire to learn from real experience, which the school seems to promote."

It began in 1979 as a recording studio workshop for a handful of aspiring musicians. It added film a few years later and four more programs in 1998-99.

Today, Full Sail has an enrollment of 4,100 and offers six associate of arts degrees, for recording arts, game design, film and video, digital media, show production and touring, and computer animation.

The school has an open-enrollment policy, and new students start each month. Good grades in high school or college are not a prerequisite for admission. But school officials say they stress up front that making it through Full Sail's 12- to 14-month programs takes a big commitment.

"Every industry we teach is a 24-hour-a-day industry," Solberg says. "There are no bankers hours in a film or music studio. You may have a 1 a.m. lab. But that's a real-world application."

Tuition is not cheap. The degree programs range from $29,875 to $33,775. But Full Sail administrators and past and present students say it sends graduates into the job market well ahead of four-year college students.

As evidence, the school points to its placement rates in the entertainment industry. From the fall of 2000 to the summer of 2001, the rates ranged from 76 percent to 84 percent in the six programs, according to statistics submitted to the Florida Department of Education Commission for Independent Education, which licenses Full Sail.

"There's a trend in our country toward private, focused education that trains people for a specific career," Jones says. "I think there will always be students who, like I was, didn't quite know in their freshman year in college what in the world they wanted to become or wanted to study. But the good news is, that for the hundreds of thousands of students who do know, there are vehicles for them.

"We cater to students who knew it from the first time they saw Star Wars: Episode I, or the first time they saw VH1's Behind the Music, and went, 'Oh my gosh, that's what I have to do with my life.' Those are the students who do really well here."

Not every educator agrees.

Martin Snyder of the American Association of University Professors sees a trend toward providing "what is essentially vocational training rather than education." And that concerns him.

"I believe the old notion, and the correct notion, of education is that it provides a foundation for life, not just for making a living," says Snyder, director of planning and development at the Washington, D.C., organization.

"So I would see (a college such as Full Sail) as a very limited kind of training program. And these kinds of programs, if they're well done, they typically have a high degree of placement. But the question is, where do people go after that?"

Snyder wonders whether individuals trained to run mixing boards or operate a movie camera will find themselves in the same position years later.

"The problem is that it educates you for something that's very relevant right now but may not be there in the future," he says. "And what happens if the technology changes radically? Do they have the flexibility to change with it? Are they broadly enough educated to grow into larger dimensions of the job and move ahead with their lives?"

Snyder, who taught Latin and Greek for 20 years at Duquesne University, also sees another issue:

"The big question is this: Is a college education meant as something to get you a job, or is it meant to enhance your life? In the long run, we think it's there to enhance your life and make you a better person, not necessarily a more skilled technician."

But Full Sail administrators say they enhance their students' lives by helping them pursue their dreams.

Mike Oster, a 1991 recording arts graduate, says that many Full Sail students have also attended four-year colleges. He got his B.A. at the University of South Florida in Tampa in criminology. But rather than pursue a law career, he wanted to run a recording studio. Full Sail became his version of graduate school.

Oster credits the school with providing the training that gained him entry into the industry and the knowledge to adapt to constantly changing technology. In addition, he says, the soundboard skills he developed allowed him to work successfully as a freelancer in film and television.

"Whether you go there right out of high school or after college, you receive the same strong foundation," says Oster, who has operated a national CD editing and mastering studio, F7 Sound and Vision in Tampa, for 10 years.

"I've been building upon it since I left there. Yes, the equipment has changed a lot in a decade. But I've been able to grow with it, because the principles of recording that I learned at Full Sail are still the same, no matter if it's new equipment or old. It's up to each individual to keep learning, and that's true if you're a doctor, a lawyer or a sound tech."

To help the process, the school offers permanent class-auditing privileges to graduates if they need to master new technology or fields later in their careers. Full Sail also offers lifetime use of its placement department in case graduates wish to find other jobs down the road.

"All through their first year, we start educating them about each field and narrowing down their options," says Jay Noble, a 1987 Full Sail graduate who works as an adviser in the placement department. "And if they don't have enough money to live in Los Angeles, for instance, we'll recommend alternative areas that we know are beneficial to their careers."

Linda Thornton is the industry outreach manager whose office maintains a data base of contacts and job openings around the country. Thorton clicks a mouse and calls up job updates and contacts from Allied Artists, Merv Griffin Productions, America's Most Wanted and more.

"I've been here seven years, and at first, the industry didn't know much about us. They had no idea of the magnitude of what we do," she says. "Are you in a swamp? A barn? But once they found out what we do and saw how well our graduates have performed, we've gotten great feedback. We know what we teach is right on the money."

Aesthetically, Full Sail has been designed to mirror a major studio. But its emphasis is hands-on instruction from pros and hundreds of guest lecturers.

The lecturer include recognizable names such as guitarist Larry Carlton and singer Melissa Etheridge. But most are known for the artists they've worked with as producers or engineers, artists such as Shania Twain, the Dave Matthews Band, Aerosmith and Tom Petty.

Christopher Evans, 18, heard about Full Sail on the Internet. He took the school's monthly "Behind the Scenes Tour" with his parents last summer and was sold. "I'm already working on an animation of a forest," the Daytona Beach resident says.

Others tried college before stumbling upon Full Sail. Nikisha Franco, 25, received an engineering degree from Southern Polytechnic State in Georgia. But she longed to learn filmmaking.

Now she's in her second month. "I just go to the soundstages and volunteer when I'm not in class," she says. "I've been learning by doing."

Missouri native Kirk Williams, 24, got a B.A. and a master's in computer science, but he was laid off last year from Lucent Technologies. So he decided to pursue his dream of making video games and found Full Sail. "When I'm done, I'll actually have my own video game that I've created. That'll be my resume, not a piece of paper," he says.

Graduates don't always walk into big jobs or high-paying salaries, the school says. Rising in the industry can take time, as with Greg Vermette.

Vermette, 33, graduated from the University of Massachusetts with an audio-engineering degree in 1987. He worked as a sound engineer, but after hearing about Full Sail from several alumni, he enrolled. "They were way ahead of where I had been in technical knowledge," he says. "I was going nowhere."

At Full Sail, Vermette shifted focus to film and digital media, and then changed careers. He paid his dues in a TV studio in Charlotte, N.C. Today, he is a graphics editor in Philadelphia doing post-production for network TV commercials.

"Full Sail graduates thousands of people, and not everyone is successful on the other side," he says. "Some people don't have the right attitude going in. They think they'll get out and immediately be working for George Lucas on Star Wars."

But there's a reward for patience and the hefty tuition that still has him paying off student loans.

"For those people who are willing to work their way up, you can still find a lot of success," he says. "I'm taking the lower-profile road, but I'm making fairly good money. I have a house and support my family. And have a career I love."

-- On the Web, go to www.fullsail.com for more information.

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