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Every passing year sees the completion and release of more new movies, and every year skilled people are required to make them. To fill this need, many good (and not so good) film schools have sprung up during the last few decades. Many successful artists and technicians are graduates from these schools.

But film school can be expensive or far away. Is getting a student loan and going into debt for several years a future filmmaker’s best way to enter the business. Could there possibly be another way, and is film school even worth the expense?

Whether or not to seek training at a school is a decision that only the future filmmaker can make, but it’s always best to weigh all of the options first.

It’s with the hope that it will help future movie makers decide whether or not film school is the best route to take that I’m offering the following story about a friend of mine and how he got into the business. This friend travels around quite a bit so I haven’t been able to ask him if it would be alright to use his real name, so I’ll call him Paul.

One day Paul learned that he would be receiving an inheritance. It was his mother’s job to decide the way this money was to be spent. The only condition was that it was to be used in the furthering of his education. She asked Paul what kind of career he wanted to go into.

His reply was that he hoped to get into the movie industry. In his estimation, film school would be the obvious way to get eventually enter the business. This career goal suited his mother just fine, but she had another idea about how Paul could learn the necessary skills.

It seemed to her that if he used the money to make his own short movie, wouldn’t that be a good way to learn how it’s done?

This seemed to be a good idea to Paul, so he got to work. What he did first was to find a local special effects technician who would be willing to help him out. He located one who also just happens to be somebody I know. Let’s call him John.

This is the offer that Paul made to John: John would gather some of his fellow special effects professionals together and they would put together a list of the effects that their dream project would contain. These would be all the things they had wanted to create but had never had the opportunity to do so. Paul would take this list and compose a script that would contain as many of these effects as possible and they would all work together on the film that was produced from it. He couldn’t pay the technicians for their work, but all of the necessary materials would be supplied.

The response from the effects crew was enthusiastically positive and together they put together a very entertaining and well made short film. Everybody had a great time completing the project and Paul learned a lot about how films are put together. He also had a nice portfolio piece that would come in handy at future job interviews.

Paul’s story is by no means unique. Although there are a lot of successful people working in the film industry, there are also plenty of self taught filmmakers who are doing very well.

There are quite a few directors(Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, John Waters and Robert Rodriguez are just a few examples) who have been known to publicly state that they learned filmmaking on their own and that in their opinions this is the best way to go.

With the availability of affordable video equipment and helpful software, just about everybody has access to all of the resources they need to make independent films. They can even get their movies seen by uploading them to the internet.

Once again, there are many paths to success in the motion picture field and it is in the best interest of all who plan to enter it to consider as many of these paths as possible. Best of luck to all of you in the future!

Tags: Movies

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