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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]