In February 2029, less than five years from now, the School of Cinematic Arts will be 100 years old! As the story goes, Douglas Fairbanks, the first President of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), thought the Academy should advocate for an education program that would train the next generation of the industry’s leaders. The idea, as laid out in the founding documents, was that an education in filmmaking should be as valued as any of academia’s principal fields—math, science, law and the like.  

The story also goes that Fairbanks couldn’t get the leading institutions of the day to bite! (Harvard might be a little jealous these days). However, a young (almost 50 years old at the time!) upstart institution that just happened to be Hollywood-adjacent, agreed to establish a class if Fairbanks and his friends would agree to teach it. Thus, Introduction to Photoplay, debuted at USC in February 1929, with Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, Clara Beranger, and Fairbanks himself—who is immortalized with a statue in the AMPAS courtyard, at the center of the SCA complex—gazed upon by students, faculty and staff, as well as the hundreds of people on USC tours each week.

Almost a century later, just about the only thing that hasn’t changed is that the SCA faculty is still comprised of industry leaders. It is not an overstatement to say that SCA offers the world’s most comprehensive education in cinema production and scholarship. The School has been at the forefront of the film, television, and interactive media industry’s most impactful innovations and pivots—from talkies to digital to game engines and virtual reality and virtual production.

In 2029, there will be many opportunities to celebrate.  Past celebrations of the School’s 75th and 90th anniversaries included galas, panel discussions about the School’s impact, and screenings and displays of student and alumni films and other projects. The centenary represents a homecoming opportunity to gather all the School’s stakeholders to discuss its future, and to plant ideas and garner support for further growth.

Between now and then, the road to 100 is a journey of reflection. An occasion to look back, and look forward. To take stock of how far SCA has come and strategize about transformations that are surely ahead, as generative AI, streaming platforms, cross-border collaborations, and a deluge of “content,” cause us to rethink our norms.

Media historians will have the last word on the milestones of the last century in cinema. However, considering SCA’s role in helping shape that culture, we at In Motion asked some of the smartest people we know—a few of our division chairs—to reflect on milestones in each of their fields, and to apply their creative imagination to what’s coming next. Here’s some of what they envision:

SUSAN ARNOLD, Film & Television Production

Storytelling is an essential part of the human experience, passed down by tribal elders as a way to create identity and community. Hollywood has constantly pushed itself to be at the forefront of this experience, in effect becoming a storyteller for a global tribe.

As the traditional studios built their filmmaking prowess, they came to value everything that went into telling a story on screen, whether big or small. There are many major milestones – from two-reelers to longer form, the advent of sound, then color, the stop motion effects in King Kong, the evolution of sophisticated visual effects in seminal movies like 2001 all the way through the invention of CG and now to the use of the Virtual Wall. The list goes on and on. All of these advances were in service of one thing—making the story that much more compelling, that much more emotional, that much more transportive. Because that’s what a good story does—it transports the audience out of their world.

When the USC Cinema School launched, it was with this in mind—creating a place where people could learn how to write and produce the best stories in the world. From feature films, to television, streaming, YouTube, TikTok and now AI, how we present those stories has changed, though the core principals have remained the same. It is part of the Cinema School’s mission not only to keep up with the advancements in how stories are told, but turn out the next generation who will be responsible for moving these advancements forward and who will make their own milestones. As we move into Virtual Production our students will make content that take place in otherwise unattainable worlds. The scope has changed, the possibilities are here and as we move into the next 100 hundred years, we need to honor what has been and embrace what is next.

KATHY SMITH, Expanded Animation Research + Practice

When I first visited USC in 1996, I had been doing research in 3D animation and VFX at Silicon Graphics in Santa Monica. It really was the cusp of all the digital evolution that would continue to expand and evolve over the next twenty-eight years in the industry and at USC. Animation & Digital Arts really led the way in this transition for the school due to the renaissance of animation through 2D/3D animation integration and the advent of digital VFX. The program paved the way in the adoption of digital technology production, creative networking and the creative digital process thanks to the work and research of the faculty and staff. 

I see that traditional and digital animation techniques and methods, structures and good storylines will aways be there, be converged, and have an audience. I also believe that the advent of diverse delivery formats, gaming, mobile media, and immersive venues will drive new narrative structuring. For me personally, the potential innovation in the art form is the exploration of new narrative structures.

I also think that more cutting-edge research in technologies such as animated holograph and Artificial Intelligence software, which drives the animation of virtual characters, robotics etc. are key areas that essentially require the use of animation in all its forms to express the emotion, gesture and performance of character.

HOLLY WILLIS, Media Arts + Practice

Here's an attempt that focuses on what I think is important right now, not looking back or forward but thinking about our current moment. Between November 2022 and October 2023, New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented a 24-foot x 24-foot LED screen featuring the roiling pixels of Los Angeles-based artist Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations. To view this large-scale piece of video art is to tumble headlong into a dazzling vortex of color and texture as if swimming through eddies of pixels, layers of lines, and clusters of clouds, your body seemingly distributed across a frameless space and an endless time, with the familiar illusion of singular human perspective dissolved into the totalizing vision of a massive, very smart machine. 

In its grandeur as well as its form, Anadol’s artwork offers a fitting visual representation of artificial intelligence, one that borrows a massive collection of images and uses machine learning to “read” them. On his website, Anadol explains that computation allows “a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques.” 

In MA+P, these are the kinds of artworks we study and create. In our classes and research labs, we continue to explore the changing nature of storytelling in an increasingly algorithmic culture, asking about ethics, creativity, and the role of the human. 

We see that cinematic storytelling is in the midst of yet another major paradigm shift, one that is bigger than the transition from analog to digital filmmaking tools and techniques. We are witnessing the emergence of new genres, new aesthetics, new practices, and new forms of collaboration, some of which integrate human and nonhuman. We also see the need for a reaffirmation of our storytelling ethics. We require new literacies in order to understand terms like “latent space” and “neural networks” that emerge from generative AI. And we need both ethics and literacy in order to ensure that our students leave USC ready to be thought leaders and ethical practitioners in this new world.

In MA+P, we understand and accept the challenge we face as we experience this profound reorientation of the moving image in the 21st century. 

ED SAXON, Peter Stark Producing Program  

Our industry is a young one. Sound, color, television, the ability to record without film, the computer, gaming, the internet, and mobile phones have each been transformative at points in the past 100 years. Each had detractors and doubters. Jack Warner of Warner Brothers famously said, “who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”, when sound was introduced.    

As for film education: Our business has always been an apprenticeship business. In the past 100 and especially the past 40 years, film schools have taken an increasingly important role as the primary place to learn how to be excellent as a storyteller. Professionals teaching future professionals. Placing apprenticeship in a university setting also has made for more story literate and sophisticated filmmakers. One notable illustration of the connection of academics and craft is embodied in George Lucas and the work of Joseph Campbell about The Hero’s Journey. Importantly, film schools provide a place for storytellers to nurture connections with colleagues who they work with their whole careers.  

Change is accelerating at a breakneck pace.   It’s easy to believe that well before 100 years from now we will be able to virtually participate in any experience the mind can imagine. The storytelling craft has always been about conveying an emotional experience. Those experiences will become increasingly vivid. We’ll all need help in navigating all the new possibilities and our universities will remain vital places to learn those navigation skills.  

With advances in Artificial Intelligence the means to produce stories will increasingly be in the hands of individual creators. Just as technology made Hip Hop possible, it’s going to be possible to make a movie in your bedroom. New genres will emerge, but old storytelling skills will be more vital than ever.  It’s terrifying…and thrilling.  

NIC WEST, John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Art

I think that the biggest milestones of the past five to ten years have been:

Incredibly rapid innovation and development in software and hardware. Creation tools have allowed artists working in 3D to visualize their work in real time allowing for incredibly detailed and beautiful animated films. The quality and craftsmanship are mind boggling. Hardware improvements combined with the use of video game engines has allowed for stunning/high quality animation from domestic smaller animation studios, and international studios. This has allowed more diversity in storytelling and for studios to start-up all over the world, which is SUPER exciting.

Also, Subscription Video on Demand (SVODs)—Netflix reignited animated television animation and took it from the broadcast model to SVODs, and Animation continues to be some of the most watched content. The benefits of SVODs to the industry are also the cause of the current downfall. It created an unsustainable expansion in the industry that has been contracting for a few years now.

And of course, AI will play a big role within Animation, but how it fits into the pipeline is still evolving.

It is hard to imagine five years in the future, much less 100.  A big reason that I was interested in taking on the Chair role for the John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts was looking to the future. The world that our student storytellers will live in and the mediums that they will be able to connect with their viewers through is beyond our imaginations. The tools that they will use to create and the way that they will create is unknown. Realtime rendering will allow for mediums of non-linear storytelling that will revolutionize how we consume and interact with media. That unknown is massively exciting and a little scary.

Within Hench we are focused on providing a foundation for students to be successful for the longevity of their careers.  That means teaching our students resilience, to remain hungry for knowledge, to be constantly curious about the world around them; and skills to adapt to situations as they evolve.  We focus on students reinvesting in themselves throughout their careers, by continuing to learn and grow— this is a trait that our Faculty and Adjunct Professors model in their own careers.

The Road to 100 also includes your reflections. Look for opportunities to weigh in. And start searching for tickets and reservations to join the celebration events in 2029.

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