The program’s other Co-Chair is Scott Kroopf. A veteran production executive with dozens of credits, Kroopf was a top executive at two production companies, Intermedia and Evergreen Studios, a transmedia company, where he developed a state-of-the-art proprietary Virtual Production tool set for writing and making interactive narrative games. He says having access to the entire Sony suite considerably elevates students’ filmmaking capabilities. “Sony’s Virtual Production Ecosystem with the Sony CLED Wall, 4K Spatial Reality monitors, and the VENICE camera package empowers our students to unleash their imagination and ingenuity,” says Kroopf. “It allows them to enhance the scope and production value of their modestly budgeted films and shoot in locations that would have been previously unattainable for student films. They can blend virtual production with live-action footage seamlessly, which opens new storytelling doors for them.”

Kroopf adds that “The excitement and creative inspiration these virtual production tools offer our students has already yielded extraordinary results.” The LED Volume initially hosted four projects each semester but has quickly ramped up to at least six films each term. Zargarpour cites a recent student short called "Parted" as an outstanding example of LED Wall-powered filmmaking. "It's about this child who gets lost in a New York subway," he says. "You can just imagine what it would take to film in the actual Fourth Avenue station. In fact, when I visited New York a few months ago and went underground, it looked exactly like our [digitally generated] station." Without an assist from the LED Wall, he says, "These environments would be very tough to do. But now, students are able to conjure a western town, a jungle, or in this case a New York subway and pull it off within a four-hour time frame."

As virtual production advances on campus, SCA alum Jack Heller ('04) has been bolstering physical production capabilities through his Endowment for Production Safety and Standards. Administered by the Physical Production Office, the endowment currently provides funding for professional intimacy coordinators and will soon encompass stunt coordinators and studio teachers. "Only a decade ago, people didn't know what an intimacy coordinator was and now it's become standard," says Heller, whose producing credits include the 2020 Andrew Garfield movie Mainstream and HBO's recent documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash. After reaching out to SCA's development office and Dean Elizabeth Daley, Heller recalls, "We collectively identified a few areas where the financial burden of hiring certain types of departments would not usually be within the scope of what a film student could afford. It can be hard for an intimacy coordinator to work on a student film instead of going on to the next big budget Hollywood thing, so you have to incentivize them by paying a competitive rate. That's why we created a program that supports student filmmakers with material that meet the criteria of needing additional oversight on set."

Film & Television Production chair Susan Arnold praises Heller's gift as "a great example of partnering with an alum who's active in the industry and wants to give back." The program has already yielded strong results, she says. "I've had students who used intimacy coordinators and told me afterwards that they felt so good on set. 'I trusted her, the actors trusted her. Thank God she was there because I didn't quite know how to handle it.'"