Costs in Film School… Egads!
Film school cost up again, costing as much as the typical American’s take-home salary on a whole year. In case your finances are liquid and costs are certainly not a difficulty, by all means consider attending a 4-year college and film school. If you are stretching your financial budget to the limit and considering getting into heavy student loan debt, continue but be careful. You can easily find war stories everyday about graduates getting their necks hanged around yearly through the mountains of student debt. This regarding it – exactlty what can you do with $50,000 each year that would give you practical film experience? Creating movies perhaps? Travel around and have some real world experience and come up with some stories? Writing stories for a year? Buy a $3500 HD camcorder and shoot short films with friends. How about chipping in for a camera they could use? Buy a $3500 or better HD video camera and $10,000 worth of fancy, fancy lights (you can get a considerable lighting kit with this amount of cash) after which post on Craigslist, etc., that you’ll rent the gear to students. Suddenly, you’ve created your personal film school! Rent a camera and lights and shoot a quick video plus your budget could be under $1000.
For the film school cost you could buy a camera and rent or buy lights and shoot a feature film. This will immediately provide you with a better education than film any $150,000 film school education because generally in most film schools, you will NEVER make a feature film. If you work on a feature in due course throughout school, odds are it will NOT be directed by, written by, or edited on your part. So, if in 3 years time, you shoot three $50,000 films, you are much past the film school pack regarding experiences (even if it’s mostly by trial and error) and film ownership (you will own your films). Just like you would have made in film school, it is possible to have equally as many filmic friends and they are not merely students attempting to make a passing grade but hard working individuals that really want to make movies.
Most sage advice you could ever get is don’t attend a 4-year film school, save your time and your money. Go take classes in a school which will give you the practical experience you need and don’t sweat the film school cost…live life, learn what exactly you need and create some movies.
