The second day of the symposium provided a perspective from across the Atlantic with the second keynote address being delivered by Professor Bruce Sheridan, Chair of the Film & Video Department at Columbia College in Chicago. His presentation covered the background to his and Columbia College’s decision to ‘reinvent their producing curricula’ and introduce an MFA in Creative Producing as an antidote to the traditional US emphasis on line producing/production management or, where courses have gone beyond that, their focus on “analyzing feature film case studies, brokering traditional industry connections, and teaching financial principles and strategies in a manner closely related to MBA (Master of Business Administration) studies.”
Sheridan explained that “We decided to define for ourselves what a Creative Producer could and should be, restructure our approach accordingly, then through careful experimentation and adjustments send new producers out into the world ready to work in the current production environment but empowered to evolve professional producer culture. We also decided to work first within the undergraduate program and use what we discovered there to decide how to configure graduate level creative producing.”