With its new 60,250-square-foot Interactive Media Building -- bristling with 4K digital projection, Oblong g-speak gesture-control computing, multitouch screens, a game innovation lab and a mixed reality lab -- USC's School of Cinematic Arts has become a virtual laboratory for future Hollywood talent. SCA has seen other advances during the past year: Bryan Singer gave $5 million for the Bryan Singer Division of Critical Studies. Sumner Redstone donated $10 million for the Sumner M. Redstone Production Building. The school's Interactive Media & Games Division was ranked No. 1 in its field a fourth time by The Princeton Review. Production designer Alex McDowell (Man of Steel, Minority Report, Fight Club), an expert on "world building" -- a science fiction term for creating coherent imaginary universes -- created SCA's World Building Media Lab and 5D Institute. And an Imax theater breaks ground in August on the school's campus, serving undergrads and graduate students, south of downtown L.A. The faculty also gained seven endowed chairs. "It legitimizes all these areas of study," says dean Elizabeth Daley. It also fulfills her motto: "We train people for the future, not the past. But nobody's saying 2D movies and flat screens are going away." Certainly not at USC: Alum Ryan Coogler took the grand jury and audience awards at Sundance for Fruitvale Station, which could go on to bigger awards in the fall; writer Chris Terrio won an Oscar for Argo; and Meera Menon nabbed the Tribeca fest's first Nora Ephron Prize for Farah Goes Bang. One more landmark: Fall 2013 will mark the first time in its history SCA admits more female graduate students than males. That might be the most futuristic development of all.

With arguably the highest achievement-to-endowment ratio of any film school, AFI, located in Hollywood, sent five alumni to this year's Oscars -- up from three in 2012 -- and more than 40 to Sundance. Scholarship money for fellows, as the school calls its students, has nearly tripled for next year, and president and CEO Bob Gazzale recruited famed writer-director James L. Brooks (The Simpsons, Terms of Endearment) as AFI's new artistic director. "That's a game-changer," says educator Jeanine Basinger, who created Wesleyan's film program and tracks others nationwide. Brooks is precisely the type of Oscar- and Emmy-winning leader who inspires aspiring filmmakers: He helped the young Wes Anderson, Matt Groening and Cameron Crowe realize their dreams. "AFI is unique," says directing fellow Henry Hughes, who before attending the elite school's first-year "boot camp" had gone through the real thing -- the elite U.S. Army Rangers boot camp -- then to war. "I get more nervous before a shoot than I did before a mission in Afghanistan," he says. "There's more weight on your shoulders -- I'm being judged individually on my artistic integrity. I could sleep through a mortar attack, but I can't sleep the night before a shoot." Despite the butterflies, Hughes is doing fine: He's in a program that matched him with mentor George Lucas. Says Gazzale, "AFI is an elite, intense two-year graduate program, and 80 percent of alumni are working in the industry."

Seven alumni and one faculty member from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, located in Manhattan, were invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year. And the website Ranker, after tallying the alma maters of the makers behind the 500 best films of all time, ranked NYU No. 1. The school is noted for its MBA/MFA program, its new gaming MFA and graduates like 2013 Oscar winner Ang Lee. NYU gave alum Oliver Stone an honorary doctorate in May. "With a rookie's luck, I got this nutcase New Yorker, with long hair down to his shoulders, as my teacher in our first-year production course," he remembered. "He was totally distracted, never seemed to sleep, talking a mile a minute. Sometimes you didn't know what he was saying, but you sure were dazzled by it because this guy loved film, and he conveyed that to us. That guy, of course, turned out to be Martin Scorsese, but back then he was just Marty, and it was just crazy fun."

From its home in Westwood, UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television has spun off galaxies of film artists: Francis Ford Coppola, Jayne Mansfield and her daughter Mariska Hargitay, Gore Verbinski, Alexander Payne and Justin Lin. But for a big place that casts a vast shadow, UCLA also is intimate. One indie cinema insider says it beats other top-tier schools: "Students get more personal attention from the department's heavy hitters. Projects are nurtured, and they come out with stronger storytelling, directing and writing skills. Kids from UCLA seem more satisfied with the experience." Dean Teri Schwartz innovates relentlessly, as with the new MFA performance programs in which actors, directors and playwrights share a curriculum; a comparably interdisciplinary MFA; and 2013's student-made TV pilot Doubleblind, on which Rod Holcomb (who had a hand in the ER and China Beach pilots) served as an adviser. Doubleblind, which centers on a genetics experiment, was itself an experiment that brought together students from writing, acting, directing, producing, cinematography, costume design, production design and music. Says Schwartz, "It's the first project of its kind, unique to any film or theater school in the world."

Art school grads are supposed to be penurious, but at Valencia's CalArts, films made by alums have grossed more than $25 billion. The Los Angeles Times called it "the Harvard Business School of animation." Three of nine student films in the Telluride Film Festival's most recent Filmmakers of Tomorrow program were by CalArtians, and three of this year's Academy Award nominees for animated feature were by alums. CalArts also was represented heavily at the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Museum Biennial, Sundance (where Yung Jake was tabbed a breakout art star by LA Weekly) and PBS' recent Film School Shorts series. Alumni cover the waterfront from pop culture to high culture: As James Mangold's The Wolverine headed for the multiplex, Erika Vogt has had big shows at Manhattan's New Museum and L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art.

"Unlike schools that are feeders into the Hollywood system, the combination of craft and business savvy that we teach at Columbia makes our students more entrepreneurial and more ready for the changing environment they will be faced with upon graduation," argues chairman Ira Deutchman, who heads the graduate school. "Being almost exactly halfway between Europe and Los Angeles, we prepare the students for multiple ways of approaching the market, whether it be through government subsidy outside the U.S., independent/private finance, working for TV or any combination thereof." For proof, check out the 23 films made this year by alums within their first 12 months after graduation. Deutchman chalks it up partly to the 24-student Creative Producing program within the film MFA, which expanded in 2010, enhancing production values and increasing collaboration among producers, writers and directors so they are ready to roll on graduation day. Students have taken medals in narrative film at the Student Oscars three years running and won the TV Academy's spec script competition two years in a row. They're well represented in the shorts selections at Cannes, Tribeca and Sundance. While awaiting a $5 million screening room due in 2016 on the Manhattan campus, students show movies at Columbia's film festival, held with the Film Society of Lincoln Center -- and perhaps dream of following Ayad Akhtar, who won 2013's Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play Disgraced, or replicating the success of alum James Ponsoldt, who has premiered his past two films, Smashed and The Spectacular Now, at Sundance in 2012 and 2013, respectively.

Chapman's Dodge College of Film & Media Arts in Orange, Calif., boasts alumnus Travis Knox's Chapman Filmed Entertainment, a partnership between the college and private investors. Under the program, producer Knox (The Bucket List) recently wrapped Trigger, a $1.25 million film with Scott Glenn (Training Day) and dozens of Chapman alums, including director Basel Owies. If it makes money, expect to hear lots more about the program's slate of six movies, each budgeted at $1 million or less. Chapman also has such filmmakers in residence as Robert Zemeckis and Bong Joon-Ho, professor Dawn Taubin's annual Women in Film panel, and an advertising/PR program that gets grads jobs -- Alex Kirkwood, Fox creative director, domestic theatrical marketing, is just one example. Says recent grad Max Keller: "I have no fear of postgraduation life. I've taken classes from people who used to run the legal department at New Line and Universal, ran marketing and distribution for Miramax, have been nominated for Oscars. I've written, directed, and edited movies. I've been the assistant to the guy who discovered Scorsese and De Niro." The day after graduation, Keller went to work for Greg Foster, CEO of Imax Entertainment.

Although Emerson's main campus is in Boston, its presence has loomed large in Los Angeles since it became the first out-of-town college to develop a residential study and internship program here in 1986. The school's Department of Visual & Media Arts will become a more permanent resident in January when classes open in a new 100,000-square-foot Hollywood Center on Sunset Boulevard. "Immersion in a city that caters professionally to your passion is very attractive to our students," says Friends producer Kevin Bright, founding director of the L.A. campus.