We want to make this project a testament to the skills, knowledge, and resilience CSUN is known for, but we need your help! Your generosity will help cover the additional software and recording and editing equipment needed to produce this heavily digital process, the use of spaces large enough to allow for safe recording, staging and costuming, and so much more. What a great lesson and example we are creating – will you join us in our efforts? We are at the forefront of developing a new way to teach, learn, and grow without letting challenges of life hold us back. We are graciously asking for your financial support to help deliver a quality Virtual Opera production the students, teachers, and all involved are proud of. We at the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication are fully committed and excited to collaborate with this undertaking but we need your help. This is an exciting and complicated endeavor which also poses the extremely difficult task of matching the staging, lighting, and sound editing, along with developing animation and visual effects, to produce a production that is the first of its kind. Film and TV students will then work to edit and help craft the visual story of this production. This stage, the digital and visual effects, and design items will be created and overlaid by animation students, in order to create a new world for the performers. These separate video and audio recordings will be mixed together to bring the performers together on the digital stage. To make this vision possible, all the singers will have their audio recorded separately, and then be individually filmed in front of a green screen lip-syncing to their audio track.

This virtual opera production is a collaboration between the Music, Theatre, Art, Cinema and Television Arts, and Italian departments and will be put together entirely by students. In a typical year, the Music and Theatre Departments would collaborate to present a staged opera, but with the social distancing regulations in place to keep students and faculty safe, we’ve broadened our group of collaborators to present an opera unlike anything seen before. This has led to a brand-new interdisciplinary arts endeavor unlike anything at CSUN – Gianni Schicchi: A Virtual Opera. While the challenges of COVID-19 have disrupted many of the processes that make up arts education, we are working to make our students’ passions become reality through a mix of collaboration and innovation.

Puccini opera gianni schicchi