A few minutes past 8:30 on Monday morning, David Moravec, an instructor in Columbia College’s film department, asked his students to get on their feet and stand on either side of a beam of light that shone from a stage lamp after the overhead lights went out.

He lit a stick of incense. The smoke drifted toward the ceiling, a gray swirl. Welcome to the basics of lighting.

“The light bounces off of something and it enters the lens, and it records an image. It’s that simple,” Moravec told to the class. “How we manipulate that light is what we’re going to learn how to do here.”

If the moment was routine, the inaugural lesson shared during a semester of engagement with the craft of illuminating stages and sets, the physical context in which the class took place was not.

After years of acquiring structures in the South Loop and rehabilitating them for academic uses, administrative functions and student housing, Columbia’s Media Production Center made its official academic debut Jan. 25 with Moravec’s lighting class. The building, at 1600 S. State, is the first the school has ever financed and constructed from the ground up.

Alicia Berg, the school’s vice president of campus environment, said Columbia wanted to offer dedicated and professional-grade filmmaking studios for faculty and staff. Finding another building to reuse these purposes proved difficult. Students and faculty needed roomy sound stages with high ceilings, clear spans and isolation from noise and vibration.

“The program of this building required a new building,” she said.

The college acquired the property for the media center from the City of Chicago in 2008 for $200,000, a write down of some $3 million. The college spent just less than $20 million on the building, a cost financed through fundraising, bonds and the school’s existing monies.

School officials envision the center as an interdisciplinary meeting ground for students and faculty from film, television, game design, acting and other departments.

“I can imagine a student who has an independent project overseen by a faculty member, they might be able to pitch the project to an advanced production class,” said Doreen Bartoni, dean of Columbia’s School of Media Arts, which enrolls some 4,200 students. “The faculty and class might decide, we’re going to cover that for that class.”

The building’s primary goal was functionality, Berg said.

To that end, the layout emphasizes complementary uses. Two classrooms supplied with computers for game designers, for example, are adjacent to the 2,085 square foot motion capture stage on the north end of the building.

Similarly, a production design shop stocked with tools and wooden planks is located on the south end of the building, close enough to the two sound stages to make trucking props to them easy. But the shop is far enough away to ensure that construction noise in the shop won’t disturb a shoot in the sound stages.

The larger of those two stages spreads over 7,350 square feet. Painted black, it is airy, with 12-foot doors and 23 feet between the floor and light rigs. The rooms are designed to muffle as much ambient noise and vibration as much as possible; standing in the larger produces an emptying effect in the ears. Keeping noise and vibration at bay is integrated into the smallest details — the cracks in the concrete floors have been sealed over, for example.

Elsewhere in the building are classrooms, a green room, a lounge and other support spaces. There is a green roof over the sound stages on the back half of the building. The building offers no elevator but a ramp that slopes gently upward from the first to the second floor.

If function was paramount, media shapes the building’s form.

“In its architecture, light and perspective are manipulated to create spaces similar to great cinematic ones,” Jeanne Gang, of Studio Gang, the building’s architects, wrote in concept document about the structure.

Gang designed the center so that classrooms could be seen into through windows edged in black, like peering through a lens or watching action onscreen.

Other referents are historical. The front foyer near the intersection 16th and State is designed for hanging out; the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation arch, salvaged from a building at 1327 S. Wabash, is installed into a wall facing State. It’s a reminder of the days when the South Loop hosted film companies, making the area an early center for an emerging industry.

The façade facing State Street is colored after the test pattern that once could be found on analog television stations. Beneath the stairs in the foyer is collection of historic test patterns.

Workers on Monday morning were literally putting the finishing touches on the building as the first students and teachers arrived for their first classes.

Moravec, who also runs a production studio called Pixel Brothers on the Near West Side, liked what he was seeing.

“This,” he said, “is a high-end stage.”

Contact: mmaidenberg@chicagojournal.com

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By Solo from Motor Row
Posted: 02/03/2010 7:20 PM

I believe open house is from 2 - 6pm according to thier website.

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By Solo from Motor Row
Posted: 02/02/2010 2:49 PM

Love everything about the building; increase traffic of students; facility itself in the South Loop. Welcome again!