Film Schools
In 1996, I graduated from Full Sail, a technical college offering degrees in film/tv production, recording arts and digital media. With an eye toward eventually writing and producing, I'd enrolled primarily for the purpose of learning the larger picture of how films and television programs are made, not with any delusions about creating my great opus.
Now, though, I read a lot of internet postings from students that kvetch about how they're basically unemployable and that they feel that their school's somehow responsible for their lack of advancement in their chosen professions.
Bull, says I.
Entertainment's a tough industry to get into. It'd be easier if we weren't constantly presented with the exciting, glamorous version of it in movies and on television, but what fun is it to hear about working long hours for little reward? A good anesthesiologist in Florida can easily outearn most top Hollywood screenwriters... you want a career putting people to sleep, don't just move here to work on (insulting reference to bad hour-long drama series of your choice here).
When I first moved to Los Angeles and was making four hundred fifty a week as a logger/transcriber, I worked alongside a talented grad from a prestigious school who frequently shoved himself away from his desk, enraged that he was doing "this" for a living. He was here to make films, to direct, to do significant work.
I have no idea what happened to the guy. I hope his dreams came true, but I doubt it. Would you want to work with someone who was so perpetually miserable, so completely cored out by envy and resentment already?
These are the guys you see blaming their film schools for their failures.
People of my generation do love to bitch. Maybe it's been like that before when now-older folks were in their twenties. I hope so, cuz it's not the legacy I want to leave.
By the way, I inserted STRONG MEDICINE.
Reply to this
I've thought about this a lot, and seen much of the same attitudes in the past 10 years. In a certain sense, I understand the negativity, as we are rarely in the place we wish to be, but I think there is a certain sense of entitlement that is imparted in people who attend film schools as opposed to other professional training.
I think a lot of the blame falls at the feet of the film schools themselves. Film schools are marketed to students as a “leg up” into the film industry, as if it is a professional trade one can assume upon completion of training. But film school graduates are not plumbers and do not leave school with all the pertinent knowledge in order to obtain an immediate position in the industry. The truth is that film school training is way too broad to guarantee ANY real paying position, as it’s essentially a gigantic 101 level course in basic filmmaking. It is the start of the learning process, not the culmination of it, but that kind of truth won’t sell tuitions.
The problem comes in the fact that any relevant position in the film industry comes at the culmination of many years of specialization (work), not from a couple years of generalization (school). A film school graduate leaves their institution with exactly the same potential as any other unpaid PA, and the most valuable thing that I learned at Full Sail is a single sentence that has followed me through the years.
“Attitude defines altitude”
It’s not what you know that defines your potential, but what you choose not to do.
Reply to this