Cinematography Professor William McDonald wears many hats.
He’s been vice chairman of production in the UCLA
Department of Film and Television for five years as well as the
head of cinematography for those same five years, and he’s
sat on the graduate student council for the past three years.
When McDonald got Kodak to underwrite 25 more years of its
cinematographer-in-residence program, bringing top-notch
cinematographers like Dean Cundey (“Back to the
Future”) and the late Conrad Hall (“American
Beauty”) to mentor students, he was working at it from both
of his positions, understandably mixing his fedoras with his
baseball caps.
“I’m not sure what hat I was wearing,”
McDonald said. “(I guess it’s) the love of educating
the next generation of filmmakers ““ that particular
hat.”
The biggest of these hats was the position of vice chair of
production, a post which oversees 100 graduate students, 60
undergraduates, 120 courses, 10 tenured faculty, 25-30 part-time
faculty, 100 teaching assistant assignments, a tech staff of 11, an
administrative staff of two and a multi-million dollar
infrastructure. McDonald is stepping down from this daunting task
after five years of building the program.
Effective June 30, the step-down will allow McDonald to return
to his more personal endeavors, namely his book on the art of
cinematography and time with his wife and kids. He’s penning
the book over a sabbatical and will return in spring 2004 when he
will begin building a cinematography program.
“I intend to put all the energy that went into (the vice
chair of production) into building a cinematography program,”
McDonald said. “I’m giving myself five years, but
I’m hoping at the end of those five years that we will really
have the world’s best cinematography program.”
This may sound a bit ambitious, but McDonald has already
contributed to the wonders of the film school as vice chair. In
early April, the film and television department underwent a review
which is conducted every 8 years. A report will be written in the
next few weeks as a progress monitor for the chancellor. The upshot
of this year’s review was an external reviewer,
Stanford’s documentary filmmaker Henry Breitrose, declaring
to the Academic Senate that UCLA is one of the three best film
schools in the country and one of the top five film schools in the
world.
McDonald didn’t do it alone, but he was instrumental in
much of it. A UCLA alumnus himself, he taught part-time in 1995,
resuscitated the first-year undergraduate comprehensive
foundational class series known as “Four-Ten” starting
in 1997, and then became vice chair and head of cinematography the
following year. During this time, chairmen of the department came
and went, sometimes in the span of a year or two, but McDonald
outlasted them all (Barbara Boyle is next in line).
Arriving during the beginning stages of digital media, McDonald
partnered the film school with Apple Computers and its Final Cut
Pro editing software. During the course of six months, McDonald got
Apple to donate 12 Final Cut suites, complete with G4 systems, as
well as all the hardware and software in the new nine-station
digital media lab. To facilitate editing classes, he built a
storage area network that allows students to access their film in
classrooms, labs, lecture halls and suites without fumbling with
firewire drives.
“The media is moving seamlessly behind the scenes.
It’s pretty amazing,” said McDonald, whose efforts are
even chronicled on the Apple Web site.
“For about a year we were the largest Final Cut Pro
network connected to central storage in the country, which meant
the world,” McDonald added. “One entity beat us out
about two years ago and that was CNN.”
The switch to digital has encountered some resistance from film
purists, but McDonald is not one of them.
“Saying that film is better than digital is just like
saying oil painting is better than water colors,” McDonald
said. “It’s irrelevant. It’s a different
form.”
Indeed, McDonald’s teaching will continue to be about
telling a story, not just learning how to use lighting or
lenses.