Kyle Martin, theatre major:  DEOP stands for the Digital Entertainment Option Pilot and it's a year-long immersive workshop in digital media and digital storytelling with theatre and t-comm majors.  We have a variety of projects in the works and produced so far.  We made trailers for theatre department shows.  We've made an individual episodic piece for Hotbox Pizza as a part of Media Sauce in Indianapolis.  We've made an individual piece with Road Show Pictures called Diaries of a Meter Maid.  We've been making other main projects and individual projects, most of them films and we all were assigned different jobs and expected to learn those jobs very quickly and fulfill those jobs during an actual shoot.  So, we learn through hands-on experience as opposed to the safety of the classroom, per say. 

Rodger Smith, associate professor of theatre and dance:  Some of the students were actors.  Some of the students were actually technicians, as in stage technicians.  Some of the students are what we call production-option people, both from t-comm as well as from theatre.  So, it was spread across the board; about half of it sophomores and juniors and the other half seniors.  My students' biggest complaints are that they go through a class, they learn a body of information, but they don't have the opportunity to apply that information for a month, two months, three months, a year and that's what immersion can really provide.  It can provide you with a learning atmosphere in which you don't forget.

Kyle Martin: As an actor, as a director, as a set designer going to three to six hours of classroom time during the week and then doing outside homework isn't necessary the best way for artists to learn their craft, especially in fields that just require so much time.  I think that really was the inspiration for this; was to do something that really allows students to really sink their teeth into it as opposed to, you know, "Read this chapter, take the quiz, and be ready for the quote, unquote real world."

Rodger Smith:  Marshall McCluen's got a great quote.  What he said was, "People who don't think that education has anything to do with entertainment or that entertainment has anything to do with education really don't know much about either one," and I agree.  They are combined; learning is fun.  Learning is by nature immersive.  What you have to have is an educational pedagogy; a construction of how we learn that allows for the immersion to join with the information.

Kyle Martin:  The biggest problem is finding a common language in order to speak.  Some of us were really hung-up on style - how do we want this to look, while others of us were hung-up on music - how do we want it to feel, and the others of us, actors, were worried about the performances.  Now we've all developed sort-of a common language for how to talk about acting, talk about directing, talk about writing, talk about cinematography, and talk about the basics.  So really my goal is to be able to apply that given language to the professional field so that I might be maybe a cut above the guys that might only know one particular area and be able to say that I have actual production experience; that's the biggest thing.

Rodger Smith:  They can walk in now and show product that they've created out of the last two semesters, products that were used outside of Ball State University, partnerships with commercial organizations.  They can demonstrate that they've had to work through complete production schedules from pre-production to production, through post.  They can demonstrate that they had lead roles as producers, as editors, whatever it happens to be.  That is a currency that exists in the real world.  That's what people are looking for regardless of area.  Whether they become media people or not; they become actors, directors, cinema people, internet creators, dot-com inventors, whatever.  I really don't care. I'd like to see them just be successful with their lives and of course for me, that thrills me.