Canadian Heritage committee  It's extremely good.

Canadian Heritage committee  I work in a limited sphere with a focus on innovation, so I will leave that to the experts.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's a fantastic fund. It's a partnership between colleges and universities. We work with Christie Digital and York University's Centre for Vision Research. Again, you have colleges working with universities and you have people who are very practical in what they do. Our students advance content production, working with people who are vision research scientists and those who are training to be that.

Canadian Heritage committee  Sure. That funding actually went to SIRT, the Screen Industry's Research and Training Centre.

Canadian Heritage committee  To SIRT. SirtNet is a sector-wide project that we're developing right now, partly because of that funding from NSERC for the technology access centre. What that funding did for us was to expand what we could do, and it changed our mandate. We were an applied research centre funded as part of a traditional sort of university mentality, in terms of what was happening, but moving slightly over to the college side.

Canadian Heritage committee  Do you mean in terms of the screen industries?

Canadian Heritage committee  The change we're seeing is that it's a digital process, as I referred to. A lot of the work we're seeing right now, in terms of the production process, requires an understanding of what that means for the production process, which in certain cases means a lot of interactivity between people with a programming background, people with a computer science background, and people from the creative arts.

Canadian Heritage committee  I work at all the campuses, but I'm based at Pinewood.

Canadian Heritage committee  I want to thank you for inviting me. I'm the director and founder of the Screen Industries Research and Training Centre, or SIRT for short. SIRT is a technology access centre, designated as such by the federal government. We're funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario government, Sheridan College, as well as industry partners.