THE red carpet was a little soggy and the two spotlights tried in vain to pierce the rain clouds hanging low over Capilano University.

But there was nothing that was going to dampen the enthusiasm of faculty, students and Hollywood guests like William Petersen of CSI fame at the official opening of the Nat and Flora Bosa Centre for Film and Animation on the evening of Feb. 17.

The university unveiled its plans for the centre in 2009 when the federal and provincial governments combined to announce $30.2 million in funding, but the idea took shape a lot earlier than that.

"In film parlance, it's been about eight years in development," says centre director Bill Thumm.

Thumm has been the driving force behind the creation of a world-class facility at the heart of Hollywood North, but he's quick to share the credit.

"The planning and support for it came very much from all the stakeholders in the industry who are keen to support our efforts to create entrepreneurial filmmakers.

"What we are trying to do is not only service the service industry, i.e. the production industry that comes primarily from California, but also to create a new generation of filmmakers that can help create a local, sustainable industry."

Filmmaking is already big business here. British Columbia is now the third largest centre for film and television production in North America.

Peter Leitch, president of North Shore Studios and Mammoth Studios, says the motion picture and animation industries employ 35,000 people and pour more than $2 billion a year into the provincial economy.

"It's an industry of the future," says Leitch. "We've had some great success over the last 25 years here, but I think the next 25 are going to be even more exciting. Part of that is having a great facility like this one to train the next generation of filmmakers that we're looking forward to collecting the rent cheques from at North Shore Studios."

Leitch has no hesitation in describing the new centre as a state-of-the-art facility, but adds that the program is run by "a great faculty that teaches students the business of filmmaking."

Thanks to the philanthropy of the Bosas and government investment, the students of the centre will be learning in a building of almost 72,000 square feet. Its core is an 8,000-sq.-ft. sound stage with full green-screen capability (a method of filming that can superimpose anything or anyone into any shot). The vast sound stage can be subdivided into three smaller units. It could be available for rent in the summer to the industry, but Thumm is just as interested in letting his graduate students use the centre's facilities to shoot their movies or finish their projects.

The centre, which is now the largest film school in Western Canada, also boasts:

- sound mixing and recording studios;

- picture editing labs;

- sound editing labs;

- digital and commercial animation labs;

- a teaching studio for cinematography;

- costuming studios;

- two visual effects labs; and

- a 200-seat, high definition and 3-D theatre that was sound-designed by THX.

"Between animation, visual effects, documentary, motion picture arts, cinematography, costuming, all in all there's about 500 students right now," said Thumm.

Next year will see the addition of a second year to the visual effects program and more classes to the third-and fourth-year degree program. There will be a few dozen more students, but the new facilities and what they offer are intended to attract better students from across the country. Thumm also expects international applications to go up significantly.

"Right now, first-year applications have been averaging around 300 applicants for 120 seats. I suspect that number is going to increase significantly over the next two, three and four years, and what that's going to mean is it's going to be tougher getting in and you're going to have to have more chops. Part of the reason we're increasing the degree stream is that we're expecting a higher level of expertise coming into the first years and that it will be harder and harder to crop as they go through second and third year."

Thumm explains "chops" as: "What's your passion? What have you done? And then we do look at the grade-point average. All of that becomes a data base that informs the interview process with a faculty panel - and it's that interview that is the deciding factor."

The Motion Picture Arts Program offers a certificate in the first year and a diploma in the second. Passing is not necessarily enough to continue. First-year students must reapply and are reinterviewed before acceptance into the diploma program. That process is repeated in the third year for degree-stream students.

. . .

Across the hall from the soundstage, a class of first-year costume students has been looking at the work of the Oscar nominees for this year's costume design awards. Under the watchful eye of Jane Still, program co-ordinator for the two-year Costuming for Stage and Screen course, the students are now busily draping and pinning swaths of material onto mannequins, playing with shape and form.

Still is a National Theatre School of Canada grad with 20 years of experience in both stage and film. She has been nominated for an Emmy on two occasions.

. . .

Scott Mainwood is the producer of Mon Ami, a full-length feature film shot at Capilano University and at locations in North Vancouver. Amazingly, it has been completed with a budget of $13,000, facilities not included - which explains why his assistant director is also the sound editor and sound mixer. Together they are checking and remixing the final edit of their sound track while patiently dealing with a media tour group. They will soon be taking it to film festivals and hoping to find a distributor.

As Leitch says: "It's a practical experience here. It's one thing to be able to make a film; it's another thing to sell it globally, and that's what they are going to have to do. I think we're going to see a lot of entrepreneurs come out of this school here and I'm looking forward to working with them."

. . .

At the official opening of the centre, amid the sincere thanks to Nat and Flora Bosa, and to the federal and other levels of government for funding, a couple of students reference where they started their studies: the old P Building that, one suggests, may have taken its name from the second-floor urinal that tended to overflow. The move from there to the new centre was a major logistical challenge but achieved over the Christmas break.

Says Thumm: "The day - the minute - classes finished in December we began the process of moving our equipment and all the new equipment so that we'd be ready to go on Jan. 9."

He estimates there were almost 300 computer stations to install on the third floor of the Bosa centre alone.

Some of the new equipment, like the S3-D camera rig and the computers for the editing suite, came out of the box earlier than the move, but even so Julian Bruce, one of the centre's studio technicians, admits the learning curve on the 3-D technology in the editing suite and projection booth has been dauntingly steep.

"It's quite a complicated workflow to get this 3-D content to that projector so it can actually display it with full, side-by-side 2K resolution," says Bruce.

He goes on to explain that in watching a 3-D movie at home, each of the viewer's eyes receives only half of the 1080p resolution.

Whatever the past stresses, Bruce is friendly, professional and low-key as he responds to visitor questions on such arcane points as lens flare and points of convergence.

. . .

Nick Oja is in the fourth year of the Motion Picture Production program and concentrating on camera operation and post-production editing. He's demonstrating two Arri Alexa cameras with zoom lenses attached to a Tango 3-D rig mounted on a dolly - if a reporter with an analogue recorder and cassette tape got it down correctly. Member of Parliament Andrew Saxton summed it up in a simpler way: "This equipment will allow the next generation of James Camerons to come from North Vancouver."

Oja is capturing the evening's speeches in 3-D, but he's not certain that the marketplace wants everything shot that way. He says the market has been flooded with a lot of poor 3-D movies.

Ironically, even though Oja is training in a film centre, he has never used film. He's still not sure what the new centre means to him, but sees it as "recognition of the hard work that everyone at this school has done."

Says Oja: "The heart of this film school isn't this new stuff, it's the faculty and the people who have spent years here trying to make this the program it is today."

mmillerchip@nsnews.com