Our Story
It's no secret that film and media arts have been transformed by technology. Digital filmmaking. Non-linear editing. Motion-capture characters living in virtual worlds.
But great filmmaking is not about pushing buttons. It's about telling stories that move people in meaningful ways – that's the focus of filmmaking in Dodge College.
Once upon a time, storytelling manifested itself through cave paintings, put there by our earliest ancestors who did not have the words to relay complex thoughts to one another. As language evolved, so too did storytelling, with clansmen sitting around the campfire, regaling one another with tales of triumph.
Today, film has become the literature of this century.
Whether you're telling stories for entertainment — in the form of a feature film or documentary, a TV drama or sitcom -- or for business, creating a :30 spot or web site to tell the story of a product or organization, the principles of storytelling are the same. And they take a lifetime to learn.
As a student here at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, you'll study under master storytellers who’ve honed their crafts over a lifetime of award-winning work and who have a combined filmography of more than 150 feature films — a record unmatched by any other film school in the country. Our location, just a heartbeat from Hollywood, enables internships with studios and production companies as well as on-campus visits from major Hollywood directors, cinematographers, editors, screenwriters, digital artists, PR and ad execs and others.
But the Hollywood connection goes even further than that: Each year, select student films are screened for industry representatives at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theaters in Los Angeles and New York City. Summaries of top student scripts are posted online with notifications sent directly to agents, producers, and development executives.
Today Dodge College has more than 1,300 film and media arts students (1080 undergraduate and 260 graduate students), 35 full-time faculty and some 70 adjunct faculty. Our program is small enough to be overwhelmingly hands-on, yet well-equipped enough that our students rarely have to wait for a camera or AVID station.
And yet we continue to look toward the future.
To address the needs of the next generation — the millennial student —the next phase of our growth will provide interactive spaces that tap into real-time global communications. Our goal is to teach our students to be master communicators using the tools of film language — image and sound —on every platform available today and help them be ready to communicate using the channels of tomorrow, whatever they may be.