Catalyst – Institute for Creative Arts and Technology (reviews)

I’m a Creative Audio Production & Sound Engineering graduate. My experience at Catalyst was generally positive. It had a culture of friendliness, kindness and helpfulness from the staff, professors and students.

The classes are not the typical classes but are more so akin to workshops. You get introduced to a subject, technique or idea and you are very quickly thrown in the deep end to get your hands dirty in experimentation and practice, which I prefer.

You get access to studios and a lot of fancy audio gear. One downside I experienced is the limited studio time. I loved working in the big studios but they increasingly over the years kept getting harder to book due to limited availability.

What I found to be the most impactful experience was how challenging the projects were. There were no exams, fun fact. Instead of exams, we had big projects that spanned the entirety of each semester with hard milestone deadlines in between. Since these projects span the whole semester, you can begin to imagine the scale of work involved in completing them. The challenge in handling all the projects pushed me to achieve more than I could have imagined. I needed an environment like that.

In conclusion, my time at Catalyst was great. Through all the hard work my skills increased exponentially in a short period of time. The staff and teachers are amazing and always ready to help.

My experience with the gear I had access to was really incredible. I was able to create really professional projects and collaborate with incredible artists and performers. The space is very inviting and promotes the pushing of artistic boundaries. Overall, I felt that I was able to grow exponentially by being able to experiment with gear I didn’t have access to before, while also being supported by my peers.

I was a student at Catalyst enrolled in the 3-year Bachelor Film Production program. Overall it was very much worth the experience for me. The principle behind the school is to learn by doing, and although it might depend on the person, for me it was the perfect way to learn everything I needed to learn. You pretty much learn mostly from just making films right away. The first year we made films every other week, the second year a film each semester, and the third year, one last big project, and this is besides all the film sets you might help on in other capacities or make on your own free time or weekends.
I loved that you were given a lot of freedom in your learning, as long as you are sticking to your deadlines, I was working on and learning how to make the films I wanted to make, the school projects and my own projects on the side, and working on so many other people’s films and film sets in every role one can think of. I don’t think I could have gotten the amount of experience in film I did elsewhere or in any other school or format in such a short time. It was really just being in that film and creative environment that is the biggest advantage.
It is also really nice that the teachers are all people who actually work in the industry too. The best classes also were when they invited people to do masterclasses. It helps a lot to be near people who are actively working in the industry you want to join. Teachers and staff are also all very open to feedback and interested in improving things, so I imagine the school will be even much different for students in the coming years then it was for me, they are always changing and evolving.
Overall it was a really good experience, I made countless friends and connections (one of the best parts of the experience), I have a varied portfolio of work now which I didn’t before, and know what it takes to put a film together now and what it will require. If you go you’d have to be prepared to put as much into it as it gives you. Be prepared to bring your own initiative in making films for example, networking, and collaborating with others. If you do you can get an enormous amount out of your time at the school. If you go just to attend classes you won’t really get much. It all just depends on how much you’re willing to put in or how passionate about it you are. But that is what I was personally looking for anyways, somewhere I can learn and work practically and develop for the next 3 years. Anything else you can learn online anyways and is sort of becoming obsolete I think for an institution. Film is an art form after all and you will only really learn it by practicing it, and here they give you all the equipment and resources to do that. One complaint I have actually is that the program should be 4 years instead of 3, just because of how fast it will go by, I could have used one more year probably.

My experience with Catalyst having graduated from their BA in Creative Audio Production and Sound Engineering was truly remarkable:

Regarding their education, I really liked how their classes were structured; even though at first I thought that the lessons wouldn’t be thorough enough because we didn’t have many hours of class per week, it actually turned out to be the perfect balance between theoretical teaching and practical work in the studios.
Every semester we would have very diverse classes with challenging projects that forced us to push our creative limits.

We would get a limited amount of studio time every week (which I do wish was higher but everyone’s gotta eat!), and their variety of equipment and studio gear made it really exciting and easy to partake in all kinds of creative projects.
From a wide variety of microphones, to instruments, to drum machines and pedals, and they even have a small library of music, film and psychology books!

The studios in their facilities are very-well setup overall, although I did think that some of them needed better acoustic treatment and sound isolation. However, they have very good basic gear in every room (computer, audio interface, speakers and midi keyboard) and a few top-tier studios with incredible mixing consoles, recording gear and mastering speakers.

Aside from the educational aspect, I think what I appreciated the most about my experience at Catalyst was the great sense of community there is and all the amazing people I met through my programme. The school made it so easy to network, both inside and outside of their facilities, and thanks to the amount of workshops, talks and events they are constantly organising, it was effortless to connect to other artists from all disciplines.
The people I met in Berlin through and thanks to Catalyst definitely made it all worth it.

On another note, however, I do wish the school provided a little more help towards the end of the degree when you’re stepping into work life. It would have been fantastic if they gave us the opportunity to enrol in a short internship or apprenticeship, or even just referred us to possible mentors.

Either way, my opinion is the same. Moving to Berlin to study at Catalyst was one of the most exciting things I have ever done, and everything I learnt plus all the people I met, made the experience 100% worth it.