Chapman University gets serious: thanks to generous donations, this Orange County-based college is attracting film students from around the globe.(Knowledge & Career)

My first visit to the chapman University campus was in 1995, when I was a visiting lecturer on the topic of editing. At the time, the fledgling film program had little in the way of facilities and equipment. There were two editing rooms containing some very quirky editing systems (D-Vision) that students had a fair number of problems operating.

What a difference a few years--and several million dollars--makes.

Today, the film program at Chapman University's campus in Orange County, California, is now housed in the Marion Knott Studios, a state-of-the-art film production center. Now called the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, the three-story production and postproduction facility takes up an entire city block.

The 76,000-square-foot building opened in August 2006 and houses two soundstages, a 500-seat theater (which doubles as a dubbing stage), multiple postproduction rooms for mixing, editing, and graphic design (with more than 100 seats of Adobe's CS3, Autodesk's Maya, 3ds Max, and Motion Builder, as well as numerous other CG programs), several seminar rooms, a Foley stage, and (most unusual) a Vicon motion-capture room. There is also a cinematography/directing stage, a broadcast stage, locker rooms, and equipment storage.

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John Baldino, a graduate student from Portland, Oregon, who is attending Chapman, explains what led him to this campus. "I first heard about Chapman through an instructor at the New York Film Academy. What motivated me to apply was actually the tour I had of the school back in 2003 [and this was while the institution was still using the old facility]. Our tour guide was so positive about the school, and the film student community he depicted for us was so appealing, I immediately started thinking of Chapman as a major contender next to USC and NYU."

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