Phil Dodds

Philip V.W. Dodds, credited as Phil Dodds, was an audio engineer who appeared in the motion picture "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Working for ARP Instruments, Inc., Phil was on the set to install and manage the ARP 2500 synthesizer used in the movie to play the five alien tones, and to program it for the sounds the filmmakers wanted. He had performed a similar function on other science fiction films, such as Logan's Run, and some of the early Star Trek movies.

Steven Spielberg, liking his looks, offered him a part in the movie on the spot; he spent the next 9 weeks filming the now iconic final scenes of the movie. He has considerable screen time for an extra, playing the notes on the synthesizer under the direction of several scientists and musicians, and gazing raptly up at the alien spaceship. In the film's credits, Philip's name appears twice - once as "Jean Claude" (as Philip Dodds) and once as "ARP Musician" (as Phil Dodds), though we don't know which said his one line: "What are we saying to each other?". In his original script, with the working title "Watch The Skies", Spielberg had written these as two separate parts, but combined them into one character during filming.

Later vice president of R&D for Kurzweil Music (developer of digital keyboard products), Phil was a project analyst with Randall House Associates, Inc. in Annapolis, MD. He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a project of the US Department of Defense. The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve interoperability, accessabilty and reuse of the component pieces of web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems. Philips work on SCORM will continue as hundred of organizations around the world continue their collective efforts to resolve remaining issues associated with SCORMs Simple Sequencing Models, such as lack of common instructional strategies and taxonomies (common definitions) for learning objects.

Philip Dodds passed away Saturday, October 6th 2007.

References

* [http://www.rhodeschroma.com/?id=doddswilliams Rhodes Chroma: Interview with Philip Dodds and Tony Williams]
* [http://www.rhassociates.com/background.htm RH Associates]
* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075860/ CE3K IMDB Page]
* [http://aicc.org/blog/2007/10/passing-of-phillip-vw-dodds.html The passing of Phillip Dodds]