The Cruess Hall renovation has been completed and includes new labs and facilities for students in the Department of Cinema and Digital Media. Scheduled to open in fall 2021, the new spaces are the Media Lab, Alt-Ctrl Lab and two screening rooms.

The Media Lab will provide space to meet and work for graduate and undergraduate projects supervised by Professor Kristopher Fallon. For the most part these are hybrid projects that combine some practice/production with critical analysis. Fallon intends that the lab will also provide some critically needed production space for CDM colleagues who need short term space for film production, as well as overflow space for the other labs.

Designed to support the teaching and research of Professors Patrick LeMieux, Stephanie Boluk, Lishan AZ, and Josh McCoy, the Alt Ctrl Lab in Room 1106 is a place to play, make, and think about games at UC Davis. In the lab, students will hack retro hardware, develop original software, design custom interfaces, and stream our work online. The Alt Ctrl Lab also includes rooms for a “Gaming Den” and Studio for course work on game design.

The new Cruess Hall renovation includes two new lecture halls/classrooms designed to support screening of film and high-resolution media presentations, Cruess 1002, which seats 200, and Cruess 1003, which seats 85. These rooms have highly specialized cinema equipment suited to the department’s purposes in not only screening films but, crucially, in meeting the needs of CDM in teaching design, construction, analysis and critique of film and digital media in specific classes. This equipment provides the specialized audio-visual and computational needs for these classes.

The renovation also supports the Department of Design with a Wood Shop, Metal Shop, Prototyping Lab, a Maker’s Lab and Clean Shop.

The two departments will share an open lab space and a conference room and breakout space. The lobby area of the building and courtyard will also be shared space for presentation of art works.