Biola film professor Dean Yamada was one of 20 of the nation’s professors chosen to participate in last week’s annual Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation five day seminar in Burbank, Californa.

A graduate from the University of Southern California, Yamada grew up in Northern California, but is now a resident of Los Angeles. He is an associate professor here at Biola, and he loves film.

Yamada expresses self through film and TV

“Initially it was just a love of movies, I really loved watching movies, but then it became a way to express myself, and then I found my voice as an artist, and so it was sort of an evolution from a love of movies to finding myself as a filmmaker,” Yamada said.

Hoping to someday teach a course in Television production, Yamada said he is proud to be a professor that represents Biola in his endeavors. At the seminar, professors went on day trips to different television sets and were taught what Yamada called the “ins and outs of TV” so that the professors could take what they learned back to their schools and help educate students about the processes of creating quality television.

Norma Pichardo, executive director of the Television Academy Foundation, summarized the event as she talked about the first and last days of the seminar.

Seminar included big names

“To kick-off the first day of the seminar, there was a panel of show runners from some of television's top programs, including Bill Lawrence (“Cougar Town”), Matthew Weiner (“Mad Men”), James Duff (“The Closer”) and Jenji Kohan (“Weeds”),” Pichardo said. “Additional session topics covered how producers and writers function, the similarities and differences that directors encounter when working in different genres and formats, sources and development of story ideas for pitching to a network, as well as digital entertainment and new media. On the final day, there was an off-site session featuring top programming executives from CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and the CW Network.”

Traveling around Burbank, moving from set to set, the 20 professors got to pick the minds of some of Television’s most relevant professionals. Pichardo said the Academy of Arts and Sciences works hard to educate people about television through hosting selective events like the seminar, through their prestigious internship program and through hosting the College Television Awards, which recognizes great electronic media work of college students nationwide.

Biola's film program stands out

“…Biola has a really cutting edge program for film,” Yamada said. “It could be seen that what we are doing here at Biola isn’t really being done a lot across the country. And to interact with my fellow professors and see where they’re coming from showed me that what we are doing here at Biola is really special.”

Yamada also gave some advice for Biola students who may be interested in television careers.

“If you want a career in TV, you have to hang in there,” Yamada said. “It’s a process, and over and over if you listen to the different panelists who have established careers in TV, a lot of them started from the bottom. They represented themselves well, which Biola students are known to do, and if their job was to make a pot of coffee, they made the best pot of coffee they knew how. They hung in there, and continued to rise and get good positions within the industry. It could happen to anyone.”