Professor Jacob Dodd on One Year of Hewitt Hall: “We’re More Visible”

OSWEGO, N.Y. – One academic year on from its grand opening in the Fall of 2025, Hewitt Hall has served as a grand facility for media arts. Built for SUNY Oswego’s Broadcasting and Digital Media, Journalism, and Cinema and Screen Studies majors, it provided a home for media majors that were scattered throughout the campus beforehand. None more scattered than Professor Jacob Dodd’s Cinema and Screen Studies (CSS) program. 

“We were sort of wanderers, and used different spaces, regular classrooms, so Hewitt was sort of this first place to bring it all together.”

CSS professor Jacob Dodd joined the staff of OswegoNow on the OswegoNow Podcast’s semester recap episode, and explained how before the advent of the reborn Hewitt Hall, the CSS program was almost hard to find on SUNY Oswego’s campus.

“Before this we were in the basement of Mahar… we were off the beaten path.”

Beginning in 2017, the CSS program was given old psychology labs in the lower level of Mahar Hall, in which they put everything from media archaeology equipment to traditional film editing equipment. 

“I call it our outpost, because it was really just that one room and myself mainly teaching in there.”

After nearly a decade in that space, Dodd had collected himself many pieces of equipment and resources for the CSS department which were stored in the basement of Mahar. However, when it came time to part ways with Mahar and move into the new Hewitt Hall, he says it wasn’t the easiest task. 

“This whole transition was a bit of a challenge… we had gathered a lot of stuff, that’s what made it quite a challenge, moving pieces of equipment from over there to over here, and adjusting to the new spaces.”

Those new spaces however, were unlike anything the CSS department had ever had before. Soundstages, dedicated editing labs, a theatre-style film screening room, and a new home for the media archaeology side of the program. The fact that all of these new spaces were housed under one roof was one of the more key aspects to how Dodd was able to transform how he is able to teach. 

“It’s easy to bring classes over… even today I brought the CSS 210 class in to do some traditional sound splicing… just the fact that it was right down the hall from our normal classroom made it so fluid to set that up and make it happen.”

Thanks to the new Hewitt Hall, the CSS program has been able to keep their traditional filmmaking ways alive with various formats of motion picture film cameras like Super 8, 16mm, and even Hollywood-style 35mm ARRI cameras. Equipment like viewers, rewinds, splicers, and flatbed editing tables have allowed students to shoot, develop, and edit their films much like film-inclined Hollywood productions like The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, and One Battle After Another. Dodd says these facilities have also increased the visibility of their program as a whole.

“Now students can stumble upon us, tours can see us and see that this kind of education is happening at SUNY Oswego.” 

One year on from Hewitt Hall opening its doors to SUNY Oswego’s media minds, it has served as the crown jewel of SUNY Oswego’s future as a media education powerhouse. With films and videos shot in Hewitt Hall’s studios already having received awards, all signs point to these cameras keeping on rolling.