For sure - industry knows to consolidate wasteful things like expensive, little used technologies, facilities and administration. It is true that all the area schools seem to share the exact same pool of talent, which goes from wasteful, ineffective facility to wasteful ineffective facility - and then they need to wait 10 years for changes in programming, which is far from acceptable, especially in a field increasingly influenced by technology.

So the "film industry" needs to take charge of devising a regional film curriculum, leveraging all the existing equipment and facilities, while planning a better solution to deploy immediately, like a Media Arts Center.

All this should fully support the entire learning continuum, from pre-school to independent guru-based R&D, like for new animation technologies.... public and private. Assume nothing works today and design from scratch - include OneCleveland, IdeaStream, CMSD, CIA, CSU, Kent, Case CCC (all branches), other schools, other video-related and film related stakeholders in the planning - learn from best practices around the world.

Now this will not solve all problems for all people, but it will solve many problems for enough people to make it entirely fundable, and sustainable - it's happening all over the world and it can happen here... let's do it the best. I'm in on the planning - who else? 

I agree the Pitts model has good concepts - I'm using their website for a general description of what a media center does. So what do we want your media center to look like. What type of building? How many square feet of what? What part of town? What amenities? Think of the media center as the anchor of a neighborhood - public screening room, computer labs, classes and workshops, 24x7 access and activity - the hub of new media activity.

I discussed the media center idea further with Kent State Urban Design Collaborative East Cleveland project manager David Reed (who was at the film roundtable and is developing the master plan for East Cleveland) and David certainly will push to put it in East Cleveland - the Mayor and President of Council in East Cleveland have already been proposed the idea and love it. There are many surplus properties in East Cleveland - industrial, commercial and residential - and plenty of vacant land - if any of that can be used to support the film industry that city is on board. I'll detail next steps there.

Gary Norton, the President of the East Cleveland City Council, is also assistant to Cuyahoga County Commissioner Lawson-Jones, so in briefing Gary on the Media Center project for the city, I also briefed him for the County. We can certainly expect the county support, which will be considerable.

I also discussed this project last night with the City of Cleveland Technology Czar, Michael DeAloia, and he is entirely supportive. He is working on a new media project for MTV and many new media initiatives with OneCleveland and other area technology leaders and all want to see rapid growth here in film/video production - this provides the content that justifies the technology we are making a regional strength. We have the complete support of Michael, Cleveland and the entire and very powerful technology industry in NEO.

The last piece of the puzzle I need to put in place is the financial structure. This will need funding to get rolling and must become sustainable. But, as part of developing the film industry here, the entire industry needs easier access to funding, so I see funding the Media Arts Center as part of funding the industry - infrastructure and film projects. So we need to line up millions, just like we do for all the other industry clusters. At least with a Media arts center, film will have a center to fund (like BioEnterprise for BioTech, CAMP for manufacturing).