24/7 studios
Our course is located in a spacious atelier building at Karel Doormanhof 45 in the city center of Rotterdam, shared with the Master Fine Art programme. As a student, you get a large shared studio with high speed Internet, 24h/7 days access and a key to the building. As you can see in the pictures, you can truly make the studio your own place.

Personal computers, servers, network
We are equipped with a range of machines running GNU/Linux and Mac OS as well as all the requirements for recording and editing images, video and sound. We run and professionally administer our own web servers, provide a full web development environment for you and can install required programming languages or content management systems for your projects if necessary. We also provide electronics boards (Arduino) for hardware projects. Students are expected to bring their own laptops as work machines (if they can afford them), but also have access to rental laptops and to servers for both experiment and publication. A high-speed internet connection is available in all rooms: wireless at 11mbps and wired Ethernet at 100mbps.

Other equipment
We provide network equipment, digital photo and video cameras, older computers and screens that can be used and repurposed for custom media work (including your own local servers and appliances), and projectors as rental items. Many of the work that you see on these pages and on the course wiki shows you that the strongest projects are often those that use simple or minimal technical means, or clever programming tricks rather than an overkill of equipment.

No labs, on purpose
As the Media Design & Communication course is not oriented towards imaging, 3D game development or professional audiovisual production, we do not provide labs or production studios. Such facilities exist at the Willem de Kooning Academy and may be used for particular projects. (Our philosophy is deliberately not ‘high tech’ in the sense of being oriented towards the latest and greatest hardware and software.)

Specialist facilities
The specialist equipment for the department includes:

• Petrol PDRB-4 Camera bag, containing:
  - Sony HVR-Z7E HDV Camcorder
  - Sony VCL-412BWH Carl Zeiss Lens
  Focal Length 32mm-284mm
  Maximum Aperature F1.6 – F2.0
  - Sony NCFD16GP 16GB Compact Flash cards
  - Sony NP-F970 Lithium Accu 6600mA
  - Petrol PMW-EX1 Rain cover
• Sony VCL-308BWH Carl Zeiss Wide Angle Zoom lens with 1/3” bayonet mount
  Focal Length 24mm – 192mm (16:9)
  Maximum Aperture F1.6 – F2.4
• Chrosziel CMB-R20 Sunshade
• Røde NTG 2 shotgun microphone
• Marantz MD661 stereo SD-card field recorder
• Ianiro Redhead Kit 1 – Basic 800W
• Photoflex Constellation3 Kit Medium – Softbox
• Sachtler 0370 system FSB 4 Tripod
• Manfrotto Fig Rig Kit

(two sets are available of all the equipment listed above)

AV-recording studio
This studio offers full opportunities for professional camera work and for ever changing set ups of equipment. For the realisation of this project, WdKA closely collaborated with Sony. We want to be able to optimally prepare our students for professional practice. The studio uses Sony XDCAM EX3-cameras because of their genlock facility and because they can be used hand-held as well as in fixed positions. The studio facilitates interactive media projects: imagery, once recorded, may be directly published to formats such as the internet. The studio can also accommodate both small and larger audiences – therefore one of the studio’s walls is retractable, opening up the studio wall to access a small auditorium across almost a complete floor of the Willem de Kooning Academy Wijnhaven building.

The AV-recording studio is a multifunctional space, which can be used for:

• making recordings for a (small) audience
• interactive media projects
• teaching specific audiovisual techniques

The AV-recording studio has the following equipment available for students:

• two Sony EX3 HD camera’s
• light sealing with nine adjustable lights
• red head set (with three lights)
• Sennheiser richt microphone
• two Sennheiser wireless microphones
• AWS-G500HD Anycast live content producer HD
• ChromaFlex cloth (two by two metres) with light ring
• green screen cloth (three by six metres)

Photography studios
The photography workshop has several different spaces:

• photographic studios
• black and white dark rooms
• colour dark room
• space for scanning and editing

The six photography studios are all equipped with professional flash and recording facilities, and students are able to work with digital and analogue photography.

In the black and white dark rooms students can develop and print analogue black and white film material (size 4×5). In the colour dark room there is the possibility to print colour negative film to size 4×5. Besides this, students are able to scan transparent material.

The specialist equipment for the Photography studios includes:

• Digital SLR’s:
  - Nikon D300
  - Nikon D70s
  - Nikon D2Xs
• Objectives:
  - AF Nikkor 35-70mm 1:2,8 D
  - AF Nikkor 18-35mm 1:3,5-4,5 D
  - AF Nikkor 70-300mm 1:4,0-5,6 D
  - AF Micro Nikkor 105mm 1:2,8 D
  - AF Micro Nikkor 60mm 1:2,8:
  - AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm 1:3,5-5,6 G
  - AF-S Nikkor 17-55mm 1:2,8 G ED
  - AF Micro Nikkor 105mm 1:2,8 D
• Analogue cameras:
  - Hasselblad 503 CX , objectives of 50mm, 120mm, 250mm
  - Sinar P 4×5″ Technical Camera, objectives of 90mm, 150mm, 210mm en 300mm
  - Linhof Master Technika 4×5″ Field Camera, objectives of 90mm, 150mm en 210mm
• Broncolor studio flashequipment:
  - Broncolor Graphite A2 1600 J flashsgenerators
  - Broncolor Pulso G flash unit (on tripod)
  - Broncolor Minipuls C200 (1500 J) Monoblocs
  - Broncolor ringflash
  - Standardreflectors (P70)
• Softboxes in various sizes (from 35×60cm to 150×150cm)
• Lightmeters:
  - Minolta F 4 lightmeters Gossen Digipro F.
  - Minolta Spotmeter F.
• Wireless synchronousset or synchronouscable
• Tempex reflectionscreens 100×100cm of 100×200cm (one side white, one side black)
• Round foldable white/silver or white/gold reflectionscreens
• Shooting table with white perpex sheet

Other workshops:

• Etching, lithography and silkscreen workshops
• Wood workshop
• Plastics & ceramics
• Metal workshop
• Textiles studio
• Sound studio
• Libraries