Film School or No Film School? (Part Two)
What’s Right for You?
From a storyboard by the eleven year-old Martin Scorsese
You don’t want to go to film school? You can breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve saved yourself as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. But how do you go about learning your craft?
You have many ways—more than ever before…
1. Just make movies. Find your story. Write a scene, storyboard it—if you can draw—or at least have a strong sense of what shots you need, convince friends to act and crew, pick up your smartphone, go out, shoot, cut on a laptop. Don’t expect a masterpiece. See where you went wrong. Do it again. Make new mistakes. Recognize them. Acknowledge them. Write a better scene. List better shots. Convince your ever-patient friends to join you one more time. Shoot/cut again. See what works and what doesn’t. Do it again. And again. Longer scenes. More scenes. Are you telling the story? Show your film to others who don’t know the story and ask them to tell it to you. Find out what they understand and what they don’t. See where you could have told your story more successfully. Repeat the exercise. Show it to other others. Did the story come across more clearly? Now ask your audience whether they felt anything. Did the emotions you intended to communicate come across? Did unintended emotions somehow work their way in? Did your audience feel anything at all? Why any of these outcomes? Performances? Energy? Rhythm? Shot selection? Lensing? Lighting? Camera placement and/or movement. Cutting? Sound? Music? STORY? STORYTELLING? What went wrong and how might it be out right?
In other swords, learn by doing.
2. Just watch movies. Ones you love, find compelling, are fascinated by. Watch a second time, and a third. Watch scene by scene, shot by shot, staging by staging, image by image, cut by cut, transition by transition. What’s working? How does it work? Can you draw universal conclusions from these examples? Think of the world and story within the film. Think of the planarity of the screen that depicts that world and story, of framing, composition, mise-en-scène, color, contrast, depth of field, depiction of space (deep, flat, ambigiuous), of line, shape, and geometry. Think of the nature of the events depicted and how they’re depicted. How does this modulate tone? How convey EMOTION? Is the emotion authentic? What is the story of each scene? How have the filmmakers ensured that you understand that story? How is information conveyed? What in dialogue? What in image? What in sound? What in staging, camera, cutting? What is the subtext? How is that communicated to the audience? What questions does the scene raise? How do they engage the audience? Look at the ‘units of narrative’, as I call them—the scenes, sequences, maybe ‘chapters’, the acts or ‘movements’, and think of how they work both within themselves and within the movie’s connective tissue, how they form structure, and what that structure might be—three acts, five acts, many acts, something else perhaps. Think of energy, pace, rhythm. Fast forward to get a stronger sense of this. Then speed backwards. Listen to the sound design. The music. Watch without sound. Listen without picture. Think how all these elements relate to your own filmmaking. Which of these approaches might you yourself emulate? Which do differently? What do you understand that you didn’t before? What had you not even thought about before?
In other words, learn by watching.
3. Listen to/read the masters. Plenty of ‘masterclasses’ online, Q&As, podcasts, documentaries, books, articles. Be hungry! Listen! Absorb! Think!
In other words, learn from the best.
4. Take individual classes, courses, workshops. In-person. Online. From practitioners (who can teach). From teachers (who understand practice). Go to acting classes, to understand where actors are coming from.
In other words, be hungry to learn.
5. Read books. Filmmaking books, about filmmakers, by filmmakers, about story, dramatic narrative, visual language, visual storytelling, working with actors, everything you can get your hands on…
In other words, learn by being voracious.
6. ‘Read, read, read!’ as Werner Herzog instructed, in a Q&A at AFI Conservatory. And he wasn’t talking about books on filmmaking either. Read novels, short stories, meta-fiction, auto-fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, writers such as James Baldwin, Susan Sontag. Educate yourself! Find original thinkers and writers, the ones who challenge ‘common thinking.’ Consider what the language of the moving image can do that written language can’t. Consider what the latter can do that the former can’t. Consider what they can both do.
In other words, learn by learning.
7. If you can, visit a set but don’t be seduced by the processes of production. Look at what is happening in front of the camera and with it. Everything else is there only to make that work.
In other words, learn by observing.
8. Work in production where you can find an opening, but don’t get sidetracked. Know where you want to go.
In other words, learn the crucial difference between filmmaking and film production.
9. Embrace your loneliness. Make sure you don’t need the club but the club needs you. As the great Yazujiro Ozu said: An artist without an air of loneliness is very boring.
In other swords, learn by listening to yourself as well as to others.
10. Do all of this AND go to film school too?
In other words, learn by all the above means…
In short, not going to film school is as much a commitment as going to one. It’s not an avoidance of a decision—it’s a decision. In many ways it’s the harder option. You don’t have a structure in which to learn. You have to maintain focus, application, a sense of direction without instructors or curriculum to guide you. On the other hand, you are free to discover by yourself. You won’t be given hard and fast rules of dubious, even erroneous wisdom. No instructor will look down on you. But then teachers can be very good indeed, but you’ll never get to be mentored by one of these. You won’t have a support system either unless you set up one yourself—which you can if you find like-minded aspiring filmmaker contemporaries with mutual commitment to learning.
Remember though—the best masters are the best students. These are the filmmakers who never cease to learn. So whether you choose film school or no film school, you are only beginning a journey that is just that— not a destination but a journey…
Peter Markham May 2021
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)
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