“Your Faith Is Your Secret Weapon”: Inside Biola’s Elite Film School Training Christians to Conquer Hollywood with Craft and Character
Dean Tom Halleen of Biola University’s Snyder School of Cinema and Media Arts is excited about the future of Christian filmmaking, the incoming students, and all that the school has to offer them in preparing them for the future of Christian filmmaking. The school is ranked within the top 25 universities for media arts, and it’s the only Christian university on that list. The $75 million training facility is the most technologically advanced of its kind in academia. When students first come into Snyder School of Cinema and Media Arts, they begin exploring. “We keep it broad in the beginning,” said Halleen, explaining that sometimes students don’t know what their specific passion is regarding filmmaking or other aspects of media arts. “So we get the joy of seeing students come in wide-eyed, thinking that the world is just about directing feature films. We get to uncover within them how God made them, and open them up to all the opportunities within media where they can express their creativity in a way that aligns with how they were created.”
Filmmaking is a form of storytelling, and Halleen noted that Jesus was a storyteller. “He told stories to solicit understanding and emotion so that the viewer, or listener, can understand truth, which, at its core, we were taught by the Creator. And this is just an expression from His example. He didn’t have media, but he had stories.” Halleen hit on the importance of the church and Hollywood learning to understand one another. The church wants stories that respect the faith of believers and God’s Word, while Hollywood wants people who are trained with excellence in their craft. “Not only is Snyder School of Cinema and Media Arts able to provide training to its students that makes them excellent in their craft, but we also train the more important element, which is being excellent in your character,” he said, adding that “even the industry recruiters want people of great character. When asked what that is, they start describing what we know as the fruit of the Spirit: kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” Halleen said the school is designed to “enhance the faith of Christian students, not deconstruct it. Your faith is your secret weapon! It’s your advantage! It’s your strength, not your weakness! So don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t make it in Hollywood if you are a Christian. They don’t know what they’re talking about. It doesn’t mean it’s easy; life is not easy.” Over 1,000 graduates from the program are embedded in the industry, making it the fastest-growing undergraduate program in all of Biola University. The 45,000-square-foot studio facility houses all aspects of the production cycle, from ideation to preproduction, production, post-production, all the way through to an Adobe Ethos certified theater, with a 10,000-square-foot production center, a 4,000-square-foot equipment room with just over $4 million worth of field equipment, three sound stages, 16 edit suites, multiple audio suites, a Foley and scoring stage, color correction labs, and more. “The focus is to make the students the most capable in the room when they apply for work, and provide them with experience on industry-standard equipment. We have a 100 percent intern employment rate.”
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