My Film School Experience: Josh

I had two totally different film school experiences, undergrad and grad school. I want to include the caveat that my undergrad school, American University, has hired new (awesome) faculty and has retooled their film program a bit since I’ve been there.

My undergrad film program was… interesting. We had 2 basic film classes, an excellent screenwriting class, and a big Saturday class with a hotshot DP from NYC (I wasn’t able to fit that into my schedule) and a semester abroad at the FAMU film school in Prague.

I will say that at the time, a lot of the film education felt outsourced to the Prague program. I learned a lot about how to do things, but it felt like the education about the intentionality was missing (ie. why shoot it this way, why block it this way, and how to make those decisions). But the BEST part of my undergrad program was my photo education. I had two incredible mentors, Leena Jayaswal and Iwan Bagus, who taught me photography and made me feel like family. I worked for 3 years in the photo lab, TA-ed classes, and really solidified my photographic background.

I believe that every director MUST have a basic knowledge of photography if they’re going to be able to communicate successfully with their DP. I’ve been on enough sets where the DPs wound up doing their own thing because their relationship with the director lacked a common language.

While my grad school education at CCC was pretty solid, the year I went there was the year they first (foolishly) compressed a 3-year program into a 2-year one.

Negatives:

While it meant less student loans for me (yay!), it also meant that things were a bit rushed.

There was definitely the feeling of “give us your money, then don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” The program is geared much more towards undergrads, with the cinematography students sitting at the top of the hill, partially because the undergrad directors tend to be a bunch of 19-year-old idiots, as is the usual with 19-year-olds.

Positives:

First, obviously, I had a bunch of great professors who helped me learn the rationale behind the choices a director makes. It’s not enough to know how to do things if you don’t know why.

I’d read up on more famous film schools like USC and NYU, and it’s my understanding that the competition for resources there is vicious. After year one, your classmates are as likely to slit your throat as help you when they’re after the same stuff. Now, that maybe reflects the real world so far as the film industry goes. It’s all about kissing ass and slitting throats out here.

But at CCC, our cohort of directors were (mostly) buddies. We really liked crewing on each others’ films, and incidentally, working other jobs on set also helps you become a better director. We constantly rooted for each other’s success. We still do! We helped each other, collaborated, gave feedback all the time, pitched ideas to one another. We learned that the best projects are collaborations between smart, interested people who respect each other. That, my friends, is how you make a movie. It’s also, in my opinion, the most important thing that you need in a film school.

-Josh