Dodge College of Film and Media Arts is one of ten schools constituting Chapman University, located in Orange, California, south of Los Angeles. The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, with programs in film production, screenwriting, creative producing, news and documentary, public relations and advertising, digital arts, film studies, television writing and producing, and screen acting. Dodge College has approximately 1,465 students: 1,209 in the undergraduate program and 256 in the graduate program.
History
The School of Film and Television was created in 1996 with Robert Bassett as the founding dean. The school occupied a building on main campus named for filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, in honor of support by CeCe Presley, DeMille's granddaughter. Bassett subsequently led a campaign that ultimately raised $52-million to build and equip a new building. A gift of $20-million from Lawrence and Kristina Dodge led to the naming of Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, housed in Marion Knott Studios, named for philanthropist Marion Knott, who made a major gift to the project. Robert Bassett resigned as dean in 2019. Following his resignation, associate dean and professor Michael Kowalski served as the interim dean. In January 2020, Dodge College announced its hiring of Stephen Galloway, executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter, as the new dean, effective March 30, 2020.
Facilities
The school is housed within three buildings in Orange, CA. Marion Knott Studios, a 76,000-square-foot building designed to replicate a working production studio. Open 24/7 to students, it includes :
The Digital MediaArts Center, an 18,000 square-foot building for the Digital Arts - Animation and Visual Effects programs, opened for classes in the fall of 2014. The Digital Media Arts Center is a working, industry-standard studio that rivals those of Pixar, Disney, Microsoft, and Google. It combines “hang-out spaces” that include a coffee bar, relaxed indoor lounge and large patio with picnic tables, with flexible classrooms and laboratories that provide Dodge College students with access to the very latest technology so that they are well-prepared to work as professionals on Hollywood's most technically sophisticated projects. It includes:
A 32-workstation dual monitor digital arts computer lab with 22”HD cintiq drawing surface and ergotron extension arm.
A 25-workstation digital arts computer lab with 22”HD cintiq drawing surface and ergotron extension arm with 2d animation light-box drawing station.
10 private digital arts suites complete with 42” plasma preview monitor, large-format scanners, and 2d animation down-shooters for traditional hand-drawn animation.
Natural sky-lit art studio, with 25 wood-bench stations for still art drawing or painting.
Screening room with tiered seating and a 4k stereoscopic projection system with a Fuse DCP projection system.
1,500-square-foot directing stage, with 2k projection and ceiling grid lighting.
A full 65 blade render farm powered by both Quanta and IBM xeon-based computers. The render farm is located offsite at Marion Knott next door, but is tied into each station in the Digital Media Arts Center.
Chapman Studios West is a 38,000-square-foot building that supports Dodge College's documentary filmmaking program in the Dhont Documentary Center. It includes:
7,000-sq.ft. props/set warehouse that includes 18,000 individual props inherited from Laguna Playhouse available for student productions
2 Editing Suites
1 Sound Mixing/Color Correction Finishing Suite
Programs
Undergraduate
Film
B.F.A. Creative Producing
B.F.A. Film Production
B.A. Film Studies
B.F.A. Screenwriting
B.F.A. Screen Acting
B.F.A. Television Writing and Production
Media Arts
Public Relations and Advertising
Digital Arts - Animation and Visual Effects
Broadcast Journalism and Documentary
Graduate Conservatory
M.A. Film Studies
M.F.A. Film Production
M.F.A. Film and Television Producing
M.F.A. Production Design
M.F.A. Screenwriting
M.B.A./M.F.A. Film and TV Producing
M.F.A. Documentary Filmmaking
Joint degrees
J.D./M.F.A. Film and TV Producing
M.B.A./M.F.A Film and TV Producing
Minors offered in Dodge College include film studies, broadcast journalism, television, advertising, public relations, visual effects, production design for film, and documentary film. The Summer Film Academy offers two-week courses to students entering their junior or senior year in high school
Conferences and festivals
Women in Focus is an annual conference celebrating the women who have been successful in the often male dominated film business. The college invites women who work in film as panelists, to show clips of their work and discuss the challenges facing women in the industry. Past panels have included female directors, producers, production designers, editors, cinematographers, and studio executives and more: The Sikh Film Festival is an annual three-day festival at the college showcasing a diverse assortment of Sikh-centric films, books, art performance pieces and music. Select student films are screened for industry representatives at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles each fall and in New York each spring. The college has hosted the University Film and Video Association Conference three times, in 1996, 2006, and 2013. The college hosted the Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision Conference in 2014.
Filmmaker-in-Residence
Each semester, an industry veteran spends 15 weeks at Dodge College screening films and working individually with 10 selected students.
Chapman Filmed Entertainment
International connections
A scholarship program enables students to travel to various countries to create documentaries about NGOs.
Chapman is one of 14 U.S. colleges and universities elected to membership in the Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision, th
Chapman previously offered a B.F.A. degree in Creative Producing in Singapore, in partnership with the School of Film and Media Studies at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, however, that partnership has since ended.
