Given our proximity to Hollywood, and with one of the country’s best film schools right on campus, UCLA is a great place to discover the world of movies and television ““ no matter what your major.
Thanks to recent efforts by the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, it is now easier than ever for those not enrolled in the school to explore the art of film.
The film department has made a concerted effort in the past two years to expand the school’s offerings to nonmajors and to make students more aware of classes already open to them.
“We wanted to correct the misconception that our courses are closed to nonmajors, (and) we want to let people know there are lots of classes that they can take,” said Raoul O’Connell, who is in charge of special projects and administration at the dean’s office of the School of Theater, Film and Television.
To help spread the word about the opportunities in the film department, O’Connell created a comprehensive Web site this year that allows students to view all of their options.
“(It’s) exclusively for nonmajors and it lists every single course that a nonmajor can take,” O’Connell said. “The site takes all the guesswork out of it, since you don’t have to go to the (registrar’s) schedule of classes and go through it and try to find where it says “˜open to nonmajors.'”
The site, www.tft.ucla.edu/nonmajors, includes descriptions of courses offered by the theater and film, television and digital media departments, accompanied by lots of pictures and links to the registrar’s schedule of classes, making it easy for students to enroll.
Fourth-year art history student Roxanne Coble used the Web site this summer to enroll in film classes. “I was making my schedule and I knew I wanted to take film classes, but I was worried they would only be for majors. But then I saw a link to the … Web site, which is really organized and easy to use.”
Coble enrolled in two of the department’s newest offerings: Film TV 188B: “Introduction to the Art & Technique of Filmmaking” and Film TV 188D: “Film Editing: Overview of History, Technique, and Practice.” So far this quarter, she has been very pleased with the courses and has found she is far from being the only non-film student in the class.
“There’s a really wide range of all sorts of majors, which is nice because we each have something different to say since we’re all coming from different perspectives,” Coble said.
A recent increase in state funding allowed the School of Theater, Film and Television to hire more professors and teaching assistants to serve students like Coble, resulting in the creation of classes like Film TV 188B and 188D.
“We were able to start doing things that would accommodate nonmajors in a way that we hadn’t accommodated them before, while at the same time enriching the curriculum for our majors and giving them more options,” O’Connell said.
The department hopes to someday incorporate a film minor available to students not enrolled in the school. The minor has been in development for years, but those involved in the school are still optimistic for the future.
“The real exciting thing is that the faculty is spending a lot of time looking at how this new curriculum can be turned into a minor in film, television and digital media. It would be a very comprehensive minor, and I think there’s a great deal of interest, and it would probably serve a great deal of people,” O’Connell said.
While the minor is still in development, O’Connell encourages all students to take advantage of the open courses, regardless of their field of study.
“The (school’s) faculty has always felt that part of the mission of the department was to be the place where UCLA students went for media literacy and education about an … important part of culture,” O’Connell said.
“The things one learns in a film history class or in a screenwriting class or in an acting class are applicable to any kind of study in an education at UCLA and will enrich students who are in any kind of major.”