PROJECT DISCOVERY is an original and stimulating
Internet-interactive distance learning course in professional
film and television production developed by many of the
foremost leaders in the fields of film, television and
communications technology for high school students in the
United States. Each of the program's two phases consists of a ten-week,
tuition-free, extracurricular, summer course of virtual classes,
interactively taught over the Internet using a new multipoint
digital video-conferencing system developed by Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs.
As part of the first generation of truly workable and
affordable video- conferencing solutions for the Internet,
The Lucent Collaborative Video system can utilize varying
bandwidths to deliver stereo sound and video resolutions up
to and including NTSC broadcast resolution. All of this is done
from the desktop with a personal computer using standard
Internet protocols.
Jacksonville, Florida, inaugurated this extraordinary
adventure in education with the beginning of Phase I of
PROJECT DISCOVERY on July 1, 1997. With the click of a
mouse in New York City, a live, two-way, real-time digital
video and audio connection was established linking Janet
Neipris, Chair of the Dramatic Writing Program at New York
University's Tisch School of the Arts, with thirty eleventh- and-
twelfth grade writing students in the TV studio at the University
of North Florida in Jacksonville. These students, selected from
the nine-county Jacksonville region, had the enviable
assignment of creating a finished, workable teleplay for
Phase II of PROJECT DISCOVERY in the summer of 1999 when
their script will be produced and telecast.
Phase I 