Adventures in a new space

Late in the month of December 2008, the entire Music Industry department, of which I am a member, moved to a different building on campus. Previously we were scattered across three separate buildings, which is not the best situation for team building or getting quick answers to questions. It’s just how things worked out.

Like many educators on large campuses, members of a department or even a complete school may become geographically separated over the years. Usually this is the result of adding new faculty members who need office space, or re-purposing office spaces to create new classrooms in response to an expanding student population. Our situation had resulted from a little of both, and this particular move would represent the fourth time I’ve packed my office and relocated it elsewhere during my decade or so at this university.

CH-CH-CHANGES
This time the move resulted from a large construction project for the Cinema department, courtesy of a donation from a famous film producer and director. Thanks to his largesse, the Cinema department now has a new multistory edifice built on what was previously a parking lot. The construction plan calls for a second building behind this main structure to be constructed immediately upon completion of the first.

Unfortunately, the site of the second building was home to one of my department’s buildings — one that housed several offices, classrooms, and a large lecture hall. The operative phrase here is “was home,” since by the end of January 2009 it had been reduced to concrete chunks and bent rebar. The university negotiated to replace our lost space with the first floor of one of Cinema’s older buildings. That negotiation in turn created the December migration of my entire department into our new digs.

BRIGHT LIGHTS AND BIG ROOMS
In addition to nearly a dozen offices, our new home contains several interesting spaces, including one built as a screening room that seats 60. It is long, narrow, and slopes down from the back wall to the front, much like a small theater you’d find in your local cineplex. The front wall comes to us complete with a 16-foot by 9-foot projection screen, while our inherited projection room occupies the back wall and features a massive NEC XT5000 cinema projector. This nearly decade-old beast, which cost around $25,000 when new, generates 4,500 lumens of illumination. I’ve since discovered that’s nearly enough energy to warm up a cold bottle of Diet Coke at six feet within a quarter hour.

Because our large lecture hall had literally disappeared, we had little choice but to use the screening room as a replacement. This has proven to be an interesting exercise. For starters, the projection screen eats up most of the front wall. There’s not a lot of space on either side of the screen for a lectern, and the intense light generated by the projector ensures that an instructor will stand near a side wall if he or she values the ability to see both during and after class.

The existing sound system install was configured as 10.2-channel surround sound, with loudspeakers mounted along the side walls at a height of about 8 feet. The folks from Cinema took the matrix switcher that fed the ten channels with them to the new building, and there wasn’t time to re-configure. So we set up a pair of 15-inch JBL Eon-powered 2-way loudspeakers on stands as our audio playback system. These are certainly good-sounding speakers, but their long-term SPL rating is 121 dB, and, with 125 watts to each woofer and 50 watts to each tweeter, they can be painfully loud, even in our makeshift lecture hall.

Nevertheless, the show must go on, and go on it did right up until week two. That was when the projector’s lamp failed in the middle of a class. A call to the AV folks in Operations landed us a portable projector that allowed us to carry on for several days while a replacement lamp was acquired. It turned out that the Cinema department had a spare refurbished lamp, but at about $2,000 each they were loath to simply hand it over gratis. I’m not privy to the machinations involved in getting the spare lamp into the projector, but I’m sure that department heads were consulted, considerations were granted, and promises were made.

Because the old lamp was utilized well past its rated service hours — it was in fact burned until it would burn no more — it took a couple of calls to NEC before the refurbished unit could be properly installed and configured. While the projector once again functions properly, we do not have a backup lamp on hand. I hope that before this one expires, our budgeteers see the benefit of investing in a newer, high-output projector featuring lamps whose price isn’t nearly the cost of an entire projector.

The inconveniences are temporary, and morale is high within the department. After all, now we can see each other on a regular basis, and ad-hoc meetings occur as needed. There will be new studios and control rooms for teaching and hands-on labs. Eventually we will figure out how to tame the screening room to serve our purposes. Most importantly, for the first time in five years I have an office with a window. It’s the little things, isn’t it?

Steve Cunningham is a senior lecturer in technology in the Thornton School, Music Industry Department at USC. He can be reached at voicetalent@mac.com.