As the founder and director of the University of Hawaii's Academy for Creative Media — the state's only film school — Chris Lee says that his main objective is to equip students with the support and skills necessary to become creative industry leaders that will in turn, start businesses that generate living wage jobs in film and entertainment in Hawaii.
"If you look at the history of Hawaii, it’s a story of pursuing indentured labor for a better economic future," Lee said in an interview with Pacific Business News. "With the demise of sugar and pineapple, the biggest economic export we have is our kids, and people talk about brain drain, but that’s because the Mainland is where there was more opportunity. We can change that.
"The investment was sending these kids away to gain these skills, and to now harvest these investments we need to create more of these living wage jobs in Hawaii," he said.
Lee, an Iolani graduate who went on to graduate from Yale University, started UH's Academy for Creative Media, or ACM, program in 2002 upon his return to the Islands after holding several executive roles on the Mainland at prominent companies like TriStar Pictures and Columbia Pictures.
The main reason for his return home, he said, was to develop a program that would allow aspiring Hawaii filmmakers to learn their craft, and then apply it — without having to leave the state.
"I want to help to diversify our economy," he said. "If kids wanted to go to film school they could always go to the University of Southern California or the American Film Institute, but if we were going to do something here it had to be better in terms of getting people to stay here and create media and film businesses here.
"When we started the program there was no YouTube, no Instagram and no smartphones," Lee said. "But all of what I wanted to do predicated on the knowledge that the future laid in technology. So this program is really about using technology and bringing Hawaii-made content to the largest possible audience."
ACM has evolved significantly in both scope and size over the past 19 years including, most recently, the completion of a $37 million creative media facility on the University of Hawaii West Oahu campus.
The 33,000 square-foot educational hub will be utilized by ACM students on the West Oahu campus once in-person classes resume tentatively in the fall. Some of the facility's main features include a Dolby Atmos 100-seat screening room and mixing stage, an esports arena, post-production suites, an emerging media lab, incubator space, and an industry-standard sound stage, according to previous PBN reporting.
"This last year a lot of time has been spent supervising the new building we built on the UHWO campus," Lee said. "I’m proud that we were able to get it it done pretty much on time and on budget despite Covid, but we're taking it day by day as far as when we'll be able to open it."
What enrollment trends are you seeing?
We’ve been watching those numbers and at both of the four-year campuses, ACM majors have record enrollment and are the fastest growing at both campuses. So this means that students recognize that these are great majors and they they have access to good jobs through them.
How do you measure success?
I will judge our success by the number of jobs people and students from our programs get here in Hawaii and the number of companies those kids then start.
While we have a really interesting group of graduates who succeeded very nicely on the Mainland, I am most proud of the fact that the majority of our graduates have stayed here in Hawaii and have been able to make a living wage in their careers.
What is your leadership style?
I think the best thing you can do is hire the best people who can execute whatever your vision is.
A a leader you can guide them, but you let them do what they do best. When we were in person, I liked managing by walking around and hearing a ton of opinions, but right now I conceptualize and I fundraise, and I try to hire the right people to execute whatever we raised that money for.
Any upcoming plans for the future of ACM?
Master’s programs is something that I’m hoping we’ll be able to offer soon.
What I hope ultimately happens is that we’re able to offer a master’s program at the University of Hawaii West Oahu, because our facility there is better than USC’s. So I’m hoping that’s something that we can work toward.
What is the most rewarding part of the job?
It has to be the kids – they always surprise you and they’re so talented. In December of 2019, I commissioned one of our graduate students to go to Japan, take a look at an installation there and suggest something we can do with projection technology, and she created a virtual transportation into a Hawaiian forest that uses a touch screen that can create additions to this environment, like a native bird, that requires the use of creating sentences in olelo Hawaiian.
This was an excellent example of how, if you give the students the best possible environments and tools to collaborate with, they’re always going to come up with the best and most creative things.
These are the kinds of students we want to stay here and have living wage jobs for.
As we offer greater opportunities through this diversification of the economy, you will see this return of kids who initially went away because there wasn’t enough opportunity. That’s kind of my philosophy about what drives all of this for me, offering greater opportunities, and so far it seems to be working.
Founder, director of the University of Hawaii Academy for Creative Media
Phone: 808-956-4578
Email: cpl@hawaii.edu
Website: acm.hawaii.edu
