jasonbkohl.com

These people? Yeah they're in debt.

A while back Short of the Week Editor Andrew S. Allen told me I should write about my thoughts about film school strategy. Here are the seven things I came up with that I find essential to any successful film school career:

1. Find Your Voice

This is a murky territory that a lot of people get confused by. Your voice is the kind of stories you want to tell, the kind of stories that move you. If you come into school loving romantic dramas, but decide to make an action picture just to “try it out,” the odds are it will probably not be as good. Basically this means finding and trusting your intuition, being able to listen to yourself for what you find important. Miranda July said in a Q & A at the Los Angeles Film Festival that she wakes up every morning and asks herself what she really wants to do today. That’s not a bad start.

2. Make A Lot of Short Films, Finish the Damn Things, and Make Them Cheap

One of the things that still baffles me about film schools is how instead of making a bunch of cheap films, we make a couple very expensive ones. The learning potential for a film generally remains the same no matter how much money you spend on it. Putting a film together, and then being forced to watch it over and over again is the best way to learn how to make a movie. Shoot digital, shoot a lot, and set deadlines to finish. I wrote a post earlier called “Good Enough,” and I meant it. Not every film will be a masterpiece. The best films are the ones you learn the most from.

3. Write/Develop A Lot of Features (Including One You Can Make For Nothing)

If you want to be a writer/director, as it seems most people in film school do, you have to write a lot of features. As with the short films, some of them will be better than others. The most common story repeated in film schools is:

Jimmy just won Sundance/Cannes/Berlin/the Student Oscars with his short film, he got repped at WME/CAA/Paradigm, but he doesn’t have any features done, so now he’s going to spend 6-12 months writing/rewriting while the buzz dies.

For a first person account of this, see this post on John August’s blog: http://johnaugust.com/2011/missed-opportunities-and-second-chances

The second (and far more common) thing that happens is that your short film is not a massive success, and you don’t get the great agent/manager to guide you to new career heights. That’s why you have to write something you can make, no matter what, for cheap.

I wrote last week about how Ryan Koo raised $125,000 on Kickstarter. He has no major credits, as far as I can tell has never had a short film at a major festival, and is relatively unknown. He did have a blog though, which was free, and a lot of savvy and hard work, which is also free. The point is you can make your first feature, you’re just going to have to be realistic and do it for CHEAP!

Abe Sylvia, a UCLA alum whose Dirty Girl hit theaters this weekend, said that the one thing he wished he’d done in film school was write more. The more scripts you have, the more movies you can potentially make. If you don’t have any scripts, you don’t have any movies. Period.

4. Submit to Film Festivals/Screenwriting Competitions

Hopefully one or two of your short films will come out well. In which case you’re going to have to learn to start throwing money and DVDs into the abyss known as film festivals.

The second portion of this is applying with your screenplays to contests like the Nicholls, Goldwyn (for UC Students), the Sundance Labs, Zoetrope etc. Development interns and assistants in Hollywood power through the finalists for these competitions all the time, and it is one of the best ways for an unknown to get read without representation, and even to secure representation.

Submitting to film festivals and competitions is pretty straightforward, and I already wrote a post about short film festival strategy, so I’m not going to go too in depth here.

Basically it’s a lot of work. You’re running a little office (I have a spreadsheet) and every few weeks or so you:

1. See which deadlines are coming up.
2. Pay entry fees and mail dvds.
3. Check to see if new deadlines have been announced.
4. Weep over the innumerable rejections.

5. Intern

Yes, this is the part where people go, “Internships? Isn’t that slave labor?” The answer is: kind of.

An internship will teach you how the industry works from the perspective of the people who actually get paid to make movies. If you do a good job, they will become contacts that can help you in the future with job searches, script notes, general encouragement or connections to other film people.

This is your way to spend two days a week learning how people who can make your movies think, and should not be overlooked. I’ve done two in my two years here, and I wish I could have squeezed one more in.

Every school (at least in NY and LA) should have some sort of internship listing. If your last name isn’t Coppola or Reitman, I suggest you give them a look.

Bonus: If you work for a small company, you may even find a mentor.

6. Form Long-lasting Relationships With Peers

Another oft-quoted cliché in film school is; “keep track of your peers, you will be climbing up the ranks together.” This is very true. How many friends did you have before film school who could Assistant Direct a movie? Shoot one?

Your peers are the people who you can go to in times of need, who might be able to help you make that $50,000 feature by providing some of the slave labor it implies, and who (hopefully) have a vested interest in your success.

In some ways this can be the biggest gift you have coming out of film school; a group of like-minded, passionate and motivated people who you can always call if you don’t understand color correction or need a last-minute grip.

7. Finish Fast and Minimize Your Debt

The bottom line is that America seems to care less and less about the rising costs of education and the welfare of its students. I recently posted the following commentary on facebook:

While we can petition our government as much as we like, the bottom line is it’s going to get more and more expensive to study here in America, at least until the education bubble pops. The sad thing is that we’re willing to bail out the banks, but not the universities.

I’m choosing to graduate a year early from UCLA because I didn’t see the point in going any farther into debt that I already had. You learn how to make a movie in film school. My feeling was that once you’ve done it a few times, you’re ready to leave. The factors that I had the most control over that contributed to my debt were:

1. The cost of my films
2. My lifestyle
3. How many outside jobs I worked

For $50,000

For $100,000

For $200,000

In the end I still think film school is worth it. It’s a lot to cram into 3 (to 7) years, but that’s why we pay the big bucks, right?

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