The CSUN Creative Media Studio hosted a celebratory event in honor of its one-year anniversary Wednesday, Sept. 2nd. The celebration featured food, raffles, vendor booths and a student showcase.
The Creative Media Studio, located in the west wing of the first floor of the library, is a place where students from all over campus can create and edit videos, art, audio recordings and more.
The studio has eight iMacs with Pro Tools, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Creative Cloud, allowing students the opportunity to reserve the computers online. The studio also has a recording studio and equipment available for check-out, such as cameras, GoPros, voice recorders, microphones, green screens and more.
“It’s a wonderful sample of how libraries are evolving,” Mark Stover, dean of the university library, said to the crowd.
Not only can students use the library in the traditional sense, but they can also use the studio, Stover continued.
“There’s pioneering in it toward a new library,” Stover said.
Lynn Lampert, coordinator of instruction and information literacy, was a driving force behind the creation of the studio.
“[Lampert] was an early champion of the studio,” Stover said. “She came up with a lot of ideas. Without her continued championing and oversight of the project, it never would have happened.”
Susanna Eng-Ziskin, a first-year-experience librarian, sat at the entrance to the roped off area where the event was held, passing out raffle tickets and device cleaning cloths.
“[The event] has been great. We’ve had had way more people than expected,” Eng said, “We are almost running out of name tags.” She estimates that they had seen between one and two hundred guests within the first two hours of the event.
Eng said that students seemed excited about the vendors, which included Apple, Canon, Grammy U, HexLab Makerspace [which brought a 3D printer], and CSUN’s own META [Matador Emerging Technology and Arts] Lab, a faculty-run company that employs students of any discipline who are interested in IT and web design.
In addition to the vendors, the anniversary celebration also featured a showcase of submitted student work, made in the Creative Media Studio. The student work, in categories of video, photo, audio and art, were judged by CTVA Chair Jon Stahl and his colleagues.
Sam Aleksanyan, an English Honors student, submitted a piece of digital art into the showcase.
“[I made] a picture of David Bowie,” Aleksanyan said. “It took about five hours. I was here the entire day.”
“[The studio] is pretty cool — quiet, helpful,” Aleksanyan said. “It has all the tools and scanners, I don’t think those are available elsewhere.”
Sitting with Aleksanyan was jazz studies major Eli McDonald, who also submitted to the studio showcase. McDonald used Pro Tools to compose two experimental electronic songs.
“It’s really fun,” McDonald said. “[Pro Tools] is a digital audio workstation. It allows you to edit audio and do pretty much anything you want.
“You can take a sound and transform it so far that people wouldn’t be able to tell what it was originally,” McDonald said. “I think that’s pretty awesome. I’m fairly new to editing in an experienced setting, and Pro Tools makes it streamlined and fun.” McDonald continued, “I think it will turn out one way and it comes out another, even better than I thought it would be.”
McDonald also won a portable charger in one of the raffles.
“It’s a fantastic resource for our students,” Eng said about the studio. “It’s incredibly expensive software that most students probably wouldn’t have access to otherwise. And I wish it was bigger, I wish that we had more.
“It’s been super popular, that’s why we were able to extend the hours from five to seven,” Eng said.
“Even if [someone is not] working on any type of artistic project, [the studio] is an easily accessible and quiet part of the library,” Aleksanyan said. “It’s pretty underrated; not a lot of people come here. We should change that.”
