Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: My guest today is Justin Rohrbaugh, Director of the School of Digital Arts at Wichita State. Soda, as we call it, is one of the fastest growing schools of WSU and is exploding with degree programs, partnerships and infrastructure for career development. The school offers degrees in acting for digital arts, animation, audio production, collaborative filmmaking, and game design. Welcome to the Forward Together podcast, Justin. All right, Justin, it's good to see you.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Good to see you too.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Thanks for joining the podcast. We haven't had anybody from the School of Digital Arts here, and I don't know if you remember, I was the one that was sort of pushing that through the Board of Regents approval and all the bookwork and all that that goes and the paperwork that goes into getting new programs and schools established. I'm glad that we've had lots of success. And so speaking of that, it's only been in existence for about five years, but it's experienced incredible growth. As a matter of fact, one of the largest growth in terms of students pretty much at the university over the last five years.
Can you talk about some of the unique offerings of the degree? And it's actually a different kind of degree too, in terms of the bachelor's degree that it is and what you think is so attractive for prospective students?
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Sure, absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me on. It's great to come out and have the chance to talk a little bit about what we do with the School of Digital Arts.
And thank you very much for all your work pushing that through and getting us where we're at today.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: I just didn't bring that up for you. Just thank me for that.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: But I think it's important that we give credit where credit's due. And so thank you for that. And I think that one of the things that makes the School of Digital Arts really unique is the degree program. The degree is a Bachelor of Applied Arts and Media Arts, which is the only one in the country. A Bachelor of Applied Arts is the arts version of the Bachelor of Applied Science. And typically you'll find those in Commonwealth nations. You don't find them in the United States. And so a big part of what sets us apart is that that opens the door for applied learning and, and taking all of the different concentrations that we have within that, blending them all together under one roof, so that there's a natural collaboration across disciplines. And so we do animation, acting for the digital arts, which is everything from acting for television and film to stunt work to motion capture, voice work. That's all a part of the acting, audio production, filmmaking, Game design, collaborative design, which is kind of a unique concept when it comes to a bachelor's degree because it's similar to a PhD program where you're more customizing and creating a specialized area that you want to go into within the media arts. You know, for instance, somebody wanted to focus on editing. They could do that more directly. And so I think the.
One of the things that really draws students to us is that Bachelor of Applied Arts aspect of it. And know we've got Shocker Studios, which is this amazing facility. But in speaking with incoming freshmen, I always ask them, you know, how many of you have seen Shocker Studios and know where you're, where you're going to school? And it's been surprising to see that less than 50% have ever been there for a tour.
And so that tells me they're coming for the degree. Yeah, they're not necessarily coming because we've got this fancy facility that. And all these production capabilities.
They're coming for the degree. And we've got students that have come from all over the world. I have a student that's here from. From Singapore. I had a student just graduate from Spain that we would have sworn he was here for audio production, but he was a game design student. So it's. It's really been kind of a unique experience. And I think what happened that helped us propel that was Covid.
We launched this thing right before COVID We founded the school in 2019, and then Covid hits. And so we were a little surprised that during COVID our enrollment went up 24%.
And there was this original thought that, you know, we're going to be here for about five years and we're going to see kind of a plateau with what we're offering. And what we found was that plateau didn't happen. And it hasn't happened yet. We still have. Without extensive recruitment efforts, we're averaging 10% growth every year.
And I think with some concerted recruitment efforts that we're rolling out this year, we're going to be able to bump that up to that 24, 25% enrollment growth, despite what's happening across the Midwest with enrollments and this educational cliff that everybody's talking about and fearful of.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah, music to my ears.
You were mentioning the different kinds of concentrations that you all have. And one of them that I think is newer and that's acting for the digital arts or media arts.
And I know you've hired some new faculty there. I've met some of them.
Tell me more about that. And How a student engages around that particular concentration, what would they be doing when they. Because when I'm thinking acting, are they actually acting or are they on the production side of doing that kind of work? Or is it both?
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Right. So when you look at acting for the digital arts that we have have, it's acting on television, on screen, some of it's a little bit behind the scenes as well. When you start looking at things like motion capture, where they're putting on a dot suit and you're not going to see them actually on the screen because it's going to be a character that's being created for a film or for a video game or something of that nature.
And so it's a different type of acting than acting for stage.
It's really focused on that preparation that it takes to be in front of the screen, to be working with having a film crew there. And it's, it's, it's different in that you don't have one take and you wait for audience applause, right? You can, you can go through it and you can change little segments as you go and fine tune what it is that you're recording. And so I think that's, that's one of the big differentiation pieces between acting for screen and acting for the theater. I mean, there's, you hit a certain point where there's, there's foundation of acting and there's theory that goes into acting. But there's a clear difference between being on stage versus being on screen and.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: With sensors and those sorts of things where they're creating a character.
Are the students actually participating in those roles or are they filming this or doing the technology side of this, or both.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: So what we have is really kind of a mix of both. But the students that are, that are going to be doing the technology side of that are most likely going to be game design students.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Whereas those that are putting on the suits and doing the action are going to be the acting students. Okay. As a producer, one of the things that I think about a lot, I am less inclined to hire an actor to do motion capture than I would be someone that's perhaps a dancer or been trained in motion capture because there's a difference in body awareness. So many times people think of acting as a shoulders up activity, even though it can be very physically active when it comes to motion capture. Someone that has really strong body awareness is fantastic on screen. Unless you're dealing with, you know, some big name star and then you're going to take the time to train them and Go through all that.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think I know the answer to this, but the listeners may not. How did you get involved in this? Because this is when you were in the College of Fine Arts, when this all came about, you were doing something entirely different.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Right. And so my background is actually in music education.
I've got my bachelor's. I have a bachelor's of science that's in education. And I started out as a music teacher and saw the opportunity to come to Wichita State. I was doing grant development. It was initially what I was hired for. And then I was in the fine arts dean's office, and this opportunity came up.
And from the time I started at Wichita State, I'd become familiar with the space that we're currently in and knew a lot of the people that were working there. And it was one of those things that I was working on. My PhD at the University of Nebraska focused on higher ed administration, leadership, and the focus was really on how can we make these programs bigger, better, stronger, how can we give the students what they're really looking for? And at the time, Rodney Miller was dean of the College of Fine Arts. And he said, justin, what do you think about coming down and kind of running this thing? Coming down and giving it some. Some lifeblood? And I said, yeah, I'd love to. Absolutely. And so it was one of those things where we took over the space, went down. We had to wait for to, you know, to have telephones and Internet hooked up and all those things. So I just started going throughout the space and learning everything that was there, getting brushed up on, all the technology, all the equipment.
And I really. I look at myself not so much as a media digital arts person, as much as I'm a cat herder.
And we joke about that a lot in administration. But I think my job is to hire really brilliant, creative people and to bring them to the table and then to get out of the way and.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Let them create a. Yeah, that's the best way to get things done. That's kind of how I view it, too. Cat herder. Yeah, that's what I do.
I know our students, and you mentioned this earlier, that part of the design of the degree of the Bachelor of Applied Arts is to more fully embrace our applied learning model that we have at the university. And I know there's some interesting things that students are engaged in in this degree program and the various concentrations. Can you talk about a couple of those so the listeners have a good understand of applied learning in the School of Digital Arts?
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Sure, absolutely. A lot of the applied learning things that we look at are very heavy production based.
For instance, we did some work with Spirit Aerosystems where they came in and they said, we need these 3D animated videos that our research and tech team can share with leadership so we can take this concept that we're dreaming about and try to bring it to life without spending all the money to create these things and hope that they'll work.
And so over a couple of years, I think we created a series of 16 different animated videos showing potential technologies that could be used in, in Spirit Aerosystems, smart factories and the things that they were doing. And so that, that was an opportunity where we were able to engage with a lot of students on that project work. And we, we have the benefit of having some paid applied learning and some unpaid applied learning. And this, this project work all happened to be paid applied learning. And so you'd get a team of eight to 12 students working on one animated video. And it would take anywhere from probably six to eight weeks to go through the full production pipeline. That's for one minute of 3D animated video.
There's a lot involved, but it gave the students that opportunity to step out of the classroom using everything they'd been learning in the classroom. And here we're going to apply this in a real world setting. Plus I'm going to be able to put it on my resume when I'm done.
And so that was one of the big thinking of animation. One of the things that we did that kind of kicked that off.
We've got probably a little over 150 different partners and clients that we've done work with in the time we've been there. And applied learning is central to what we do. One of the things that we do is for each of our technological areas. So our recording studios, editing suite, animation studio, Synthetic Scenes, which is our LED virtual production studio. We hire student technicians to come in, learn the technical side of how all of that works, and then they work with other students. When students come in, they'll troubleshoot, you know, we'll get phone calls, hey, I would love to come use the recording studios. And our student technicians say, okay, well here's a QR code you can select from all these different student engineers.
Pick someone, and then the students negotiate a rate to work directly with whomever's needing that work done. So it gives them some, some opportunity to apply that real world. How do I negotiate my rate? How do I value what it is that I bring as a creative? And I think that's until you can do that in real time in a real world setting. You don't have a strong understanding of what does that mean and how challenging it is particularly for artists to value their work.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Yeah. So how many people now are working in the school?
[00:13:29] Speaker B: So do you mean total working or faculty?
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Faculty, staff.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Faculty, staff. Right now we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 full time faculty. We have two staff. We're currently searching for a third staff to help with recruitment and communications.
We're looking to hire a couple more faculty this year that would move into our growth plan for next year.
And when it comes to adjuncts, I get to work with some really amazing people. And so we probably have a cadre of around 20 adjuncts.
I've got one person in particular, Doug Kimball. He was front of house sound for bands going back to Velvet Revolver and Journey and Def Leppard. All the, all these different bands.
And his, his. He goes. My last gig was Aerosmith's 50th anniversary tour. I did front of house sound. He was. I'm ready to, to be back in Wichita to slow things down. So he's teaching our advanced live sound class.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: And he's teaching music business. And so he's got that real world experience. And, and he, he just turned down. There was. There's a group of bands that's touring right now. It's.
He turned me out and said no, I'm teaching at Wichita State this year. I can't do that. And I was like, wow, that's. That's pretty cool. So. So we get. Get people exposed to, to folks like that. And one of the things that I'm really excited about too is we have a very diverse faculty.
We have of our. Of our full time faculty. We're at just under 50% Hispanic or Latino.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Oh wow.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: And that's. To me that's really exciting that we're.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: That's demographic of our student body moving towards that.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: So I know you have some new technologies. Recently had an open house last week.
And it provides all kinds of incredible experiences, not just for students, but also the school and being able to connect with other organizations that need your services. Can you tell us more about what some of those things are?
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Sure. So I'll kind of run through the list because there's actually quite a bit. We have our film studio that's got different colored cycloramas where we've done filming with Netflix and Freddy's Frozen Custard and Hustler Turf lawnmowers. Just a variety of things.
We've got recording studios, both digital and analog. We just finished doing some stuff with Schofield, Honda, some voiceover work for them in there. We have a virtual driving simulator in our game design studio that students can develop and use this actual simulator to show the movement of what would happen.
We have our own podcast studio. We've got a sitcom set we built. So many times theater programs, they'll build a set, they'll do their show, and then they tear it down for us. I wanted a set that we could build and it could live there. And our filmmaking students could come in and they can learn how to do multi camera shots. They can learn how to light it. The acting students can come in and learn how to manipulate and use the set. So we built one and said this, this is. And you don't always think of technology as being something that's that simple, but it really is. Having that physical set is a significant piece of technology that the students get to use. And then you flip the gamut to. Our most recent acquisition, we've partnered with Justin McClure Creative to create what is called synthetic scenes, which is a massive LED wall wall to do virtual production, which was a technology that we'd started looking at. Right. Right as we were forming the score. Like I saw one of these in the University of Michigan at the Duderstadt, and I said, wow, we need that. And Dean Miller goes, yeah, why don't you check into that? And so we started looking and found out really quick that it was going to be cost prohibitive. And so we started looking at options and things we could do. And now we've developed this partnership to where we physically have on site, you know, a 35 foot by 12 foot curved wall that we can do virtual production on, similar to shows like the Mandalorian and some of these that create virtual sets.
And it's using game design engines that they do that. And so it's really one of those things that we have technologies that are modern and unique, but also that bring all of the different concentrations together to create and produce creative projects.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Yeah, so I do know this. All that technology is very expensive. And also students I know have a fee that helps cover some of that. So, listeners, if you're wanting to help support this kind of work, I know Justin would be able to hook you up with the right person to talk to more about that.
So one other thing I wanted to ask you before we move on.
What is the most popular concentration? There's six of them now.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: I think the most popular of them all is Game design, we have right around 165, 170 students that are in game design, followed closely by animation. That's around 120 to 130. And film is over 100. Audio production, we did a major revamping of, and it went from being maybe 20 to 30 students to 70.
And I expect it will continue to grow. Acting is new, so it's one of our smaller concentrations, but I anticipate it's going to grow as well.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Yeah, well. And I keep coming back to acting because I think it's interesting.
I met a couple of new faculty members recently.
And, you know, there's a lot of voiceover work that comes with that as well too. That is, you know, any kind of organization now is trying to create content and they need that kind of thing. And then, you know, back to video and audio, all organizations are wanting. We have such a hard time, even in this studio, keeping people employed because there's so many opportunities out there. So I. I think it's exciting that we have that capability to provide that education and training and so forth to create more talent in that area. So what do you see as a future? So we've added some concentrations over time in this whole field. What do you see as the future?
[00:19:57] Speaker B: So what I see happening, and we've been witnessing this really, and I go back to Covid again, everybody saw that we could push to digital and make things quite successful. And in. In the digital realm, this is kind of like the new age of everything that's happening with the arts. It's not necessarily that we're changing traditional fine arts. We're providing different mediums to bring those to new audiences that may not have had the opportunity before.
And so I think this is going to be an area that's going to continue to grow. I think the opportunities are continually evolving. And that's one of the benefits we have to a facility like we have with Shocker Studios is that we're able to bring in new technology as it's being developed and develop partnerships where we get to try some of these things out. And as software evolves, as techniques evolve, there's a constant need and a constant demand for learning these skills, but also a lot of up training opportunity where people that have been working in these industries and maybe they've been doing it a traditional way, now they have the opportunity to come into the school of Digital arts and pick up some of the new digital techniques. And how are we doing this? You know, film was notorious for you had a limited amount of footage you had so much stock that you could shoot on. And then you better make sure it's right, because when you're out of stock, you're out of stock. With digital, you have the benefit of being able to. Okay, that was. That take was okay. But here, let's redo that.
Not that it's better, not that it's worse. It's just different. It's just an evolution of what we're doing. And I think that's going to continue, especially as we look at things that are happening with artificial intelligence and advances in software development, all those things. I think we're going to see the digital arts continue to grow and to be a very viable and busy field.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: And so tell me a little bit more about. You said that this is the only BAA in the country, but what is the nearest competition, if you will, of universities that have something similar to this particular school?
[00:22:08] Speaker B: So it's the BA in Media Arts. Specifically, it's the only one in the country.
There are schools, Savannah College of Art and Design, they have a lot of programs that are very similar.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Where's that located?
[00:22:20] Speaker B: It's in Atlanta, Georgia.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Or Savannah, Georgia.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: And so they're similar in that they have. They offer the same things we do, but they're unfortunately in a lot of typical higher ed structure. They're. They're siloed.
Whereas with this all being collaborative in one space, I don't know that there's really another program that does it all collaboratively in one space. But there are schools that have these individual things.
And so Ringling, and I'm not sure where Ringling's at. There's.
When people talk about film schools, we're in no means a usc.
But this morning we had some people came through and they said, wow, we've seen this at usc, but nowhere else. And so I think there's some things that we're doing that are pushing us in a different league of competition than what we're used. Used to. And when we look at those. Those other schools that we align with, I think that with these. These unique degree paths, we're. We're elevating what those are for Wichita State.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And tell us a little bit about where students are finding jobs and how's that going.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: So one of the. One of the biggest challenges for me is we're new enough. We don't have a lot of grads yet because it takes takes time to get them through. So some of the students that have graduated have found some success. We have an animation student that while she, she was a student, she was a DACA student.
She'd left, went to Mexico for a year, finished all of her residency requirements, came back and then all these opportunities implied learning. She grabbed a hold of, she said, how can I, how can I get involved? And then her first job after she graduated was creating 3D models of shoes for Prada.
And so that, that's a great first job right out of the gate. And, and now she's down in Austin. She was working for a production company kind of remotely and now she's moved on to a new company and she's, she just took her job and she can't tell me who she's working for yet, but she's really itching to tell me.
So, so that's, that's a for instance to someone that's, that's doing something. We've had some folks in game design that have, have gone coastally. We've got some that have gone up to Canada as well and Austin and they're finding really great places to work. And we've landed some internships with some of the big known game companies where we've had students go in the summers and do internships with them. And so we're also seeing, if we look at our filmmaking, we're seeing those students are working for the local production houses. Some of them are hiring on with production companies and working on films or TV shows. We had one student who went down to right after he graduated was working on the Bachelorette and he called, the first thing he did was he wrecked the grip truck.
He hit something on an awning on a building or something.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: You don't teach that probably.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: That's nothing that we teach. Yeah, but yeah, they're going out and they're having those real world experiences. I'm hopeful for the day that we'll see more of that. That they're not leaving the state of Kansas and they're getting to do more of that here in the state. And so there's some, some things that are happening in that, that avenue that hopefully will come to fruition and that will bring more opportunities. I know that there's an animation company that's, that's going to be locating an office here in Wichita and they've, they've home offices in the uk. So for Wichita to draw that type of talent and that opportunity to the area I think is a big opportunity for the students.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: I think one of the other things that I would imagine makes this a stronger school is that it's a part of The College of Fine Arts, because some of these programs probably in other universities are freestanding schools outside of this college structure. And we have the School of Music, the School of Art and Design, and Creative Industries and Performing Arts. That ties into that too. And I think it's more likely to strengthen the experiences that your students get in the School of Digital Arts.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: And I think you're absolutely right. I know when I was going to school, I got a scholarship, this music scholarship. And my choices were become a professional tuba player or go become a teacher. Well, I didn't want to be a professional tuba player. It didn't appeal to me. So I went to become a teacher. Had I had the opportunity to go into audio production, I probably would have jumped all over it, would have been really excited about that. And so what I see is I see students that, that will come, you know, the School of Music as an example. They'll come in, they'll be like, wow, not only can I study my instrument, I can go in and record myself. I can, I can do these different things. That. I certainly enhances everything that we do within the College of Fine Arts. And I think that it, it broadens the, the unique opportunities available through the College of Fine Arts at Wichita.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: And you know, I have to put a plug in for the College of Fine Arts. It's one of the few comprehensive colleges of fine arts in our region that, where you see all these, the various collections of majors and the performing arts and music, art and all, all of this and what you're doing all together. So I think that's awesome. Okay, so finally it's kind of a fun thing. If you could remake any movie or TV show in Shocker Studios, what would that be? If you have, if it's more than one, that's fine too.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: So that's a great question.
And one of the first thing that it comes to mind is I think about the original Star Trek because of the holodeck and I think of with us having this virtual production space, we literally have the holodeck sitting down at Shocker Studios where we can create those very, those very things. So I think it would be, I think, would be fun to recreate Star Trek, but. But I also think there's some opportunity for some things that could happen in Kansas that we could film that would, would highlight Kansas as a state in Wichita as the city that it is that I think would be fun. And I don't know that it's necessari remake. And I was speaking with a team of faculty earlier and we were kind of posing this question to each other, you know, what if we could remake something, what would it be? And someone said, you know, it'd be really cool to remake Cheers because it's that quintessential small town America. This is, this is the every man's place to come and have a beer and relax. And they thought that would be a lot of fun to remake something like that. So I think it, for me, it was the Star Trek thing. I think recreating that would be a lot of fun. And, you know, if I could have William Shatner back in his prime as being there, that would be a whole other. At a whole other element.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: But you could, you could create that, that vision, right? And the concentration for acting and.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Sure, absolutely.
[00:29:33] Speaker A: He doesn't.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: We could make it.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: He doesn't have to be there.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thanks for that and it's good to see you. Thank you for your leadership. The school is only five years old and we have all of these students majoring in this particular area that we wouldn't have had if it wasn't for you and others who had this vision and put it together. So we thank you so much for that and thanks for stopping by the podcast.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Thank you, Rick.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: And thank you all for listening and be sure to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to the Forward Together podcast go. Shockers.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Sponsorship for the Forward Together podcast is provided by Scott Rice officeworks and the Shocker Store.
Additional thanks to Nair Amp WSU Carpentry Shop and gocreate.
