My students know how to edit footage and use a zoom lens; they’re experts on lighting and composing a shot. But because they learned those techniques through their phones to upload to social media platforms, they use them in a completely different manner than what usually gets taught in a filmmaking class. It might be easy to dismiss these skills, developed mostly to impress their friends, but more and more jobs are looking for university graduates who can create, use and distribute video content (or just light themselves for Zoom). In that model, appreciating a movie is not exactly a […]

In the late 1990s and early aughts, film schools moved away from film itself as digital cameras (and editing) became the main tools. What’s happening today may not be quite as seismic but will still change film schools’ DNA: the movie and TV industry is moving toward virtual production. Popularized by The Mandalorian, virtual production essentially takes green/blue screen to the next level, and in some ways, it reverses traditional workflows. Instead of cast and crew finishing principal photography and then handing it off to an army of VFX techies, the techies create that VFX before anyone steps on set. […]

Across U.S. film schools this spring, a similar scene played out. The novel coronavirus went from faraway topic to urgent local threat. As rolling stay-at-home orders were issued, administrators shut down campuses, students scrambled for transport home and film departments quickly improvised online teaching methods that would allow instruction to continue even as students couldn’t attend classes and screenings in theaters or crew each other’s shoots in person.  Three months later, we know much more about the coronavirus: its asymptomatic transmission, resistance to warm weather and ability to target multiple organ systems in the body. And with early, erratically applied […]

On the first day of any given screen-acting class at Northwestern University, it’s not uncommon for me to be facing down a bifurcated group of eight theater students and eight film students. As I sit on the receiving end of nerve-wracked glares, listening to introductory tales of middle school plays and high school short films, of little to some to no experience, I seek to comfort and calm with one simple statement: Everything you need to know about film acting you can learn in 30 seconds. It’s only now that I realize I’ve been lying to them.  It is one […]

With most incoming film students being required to make shorts during their undergraduate or graduate studies, what exemplars of the form should they look to for inspiration? Filmmaker asked a number of friends—all filmmakers—who teach filmmaking at a cross-section of institutions to list the short films they think all incoming students should check out and be inspired by. Howard A. Rodman, professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts: I consistently recommend to my students—whose films often lead with cinematography, visual effects and sound mix—that they see Andrea Arnold’s Academy Award–winning 2003 short film Wasp. Adequate direct sound, wobbly cam, minimalist VFX, yet […]

When it came time for A.B. Shawky to make Yomeddine, a road movie about a leper trekking across Egypt in search of lost relatives, he turned to his NYU Tisch School of the Arts colleagues and faculty for advice. After all, the movie is both his first feature as well his NYU thesis film. Unlike many film schools, “NYU encourages you to do features for your thesis project,” Shawky told Filmmaker’s Tiffany Pritchard, explaining that the school granted him an extra year on top of the two normally allowed to complete the arduous production. The school also granted him key […]

It might have seemed like an odd fit when I was brought in to help launch the new Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri’s esteemed School of Journalism in 2015. If one were to describe my films, such as Kate Plays Christine or Actress, the word “journalistic” isn’t likely to come to mind. Yet there I was, in the hallowed halls of the world’s oldest journalism school, working with Stacey Woelfel, a 30-year veteran of the institution, to build a new program from scratch. We wanted to create what Woelfel calls the “pirate radio […]

The issue of diversity in the film canon — the movies celebrated and studied at film schools across the country — has come under hot debate in the past couple of years, with students starting conversations about the larger consequences of curricular omissions. “When I look at a syllabus and there’s no one from my perspective on there, I wonder if my ideas will be taken seriously by Hollywood or by any producer,” admits Zsaknor Powe, a junior studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “It really affects the artistic self-esteem of the students,” explains Powe, […]