The Future of Student Films

EL-34 writes "With professional visual effects tools and technology readily available in film schools across the country, students have been able to do more than ever before. At the USC School of Cinema-Television, SCFX teaches the trade, and helps create VFX for various student films. With endowments from Robert Zemeckis, EA, AlienWare, Intel, and Adobe, cinema students are able to achieve feats never before possible in animation, rendering, and compositing. At the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, students even have access to HD equipment, a Vicon 3-D Motion Capture System, and a green screen stage."

Comments

Some great films:

[physicsphairy]

Doom Raiders is a sort of Indian Jones/The Mummy parody made by some kids from teh UK. It is truly awesome. They even got the British military to fly a helicopter for them in one of their stunts. Obviously, they had a lot of connections, but it still shows the possibilities of amateur film making.

Grayson is another great. It is actually just a trailer (~7 minutes) but if you saw this on TV you would not for the life you be able to distinguish it from a multimillion dollar production. Well, except for the tell-tale signs of an original plot. :p

Another great is Batman: Deadend. This is just a short. I believe it was shown firts at last year's ComicCon. Like the previous, there were obviously professionals involved, but it was still just a group of friends who put it together, though they happened to be familiar with production methods. The costumes all incredibe. Don't read this if you don't want me to spoil it, but they have Batman, Alien, and Predator costumes that are not in any way inferior to those you saw in the actual movies (personally, I think the Batman costume is better). The dark cinematography is really good too.

Now, nothing I linked to disputes that producing a film is a major effort that requires a lot of work and resources; but it does dispute the idea that you need millions of dollars to do so.

And I figure it's a good opportunity for some of my fellow slashdotters to enjoy some great movies. :)

Palme d'Or?

[rduke15]

a classmate [...] spent a minimal $11,000 [...] and it won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Palme d'or? The exageration is only minimal, I guess? :-)

Just for fun, here they are all, since 1975 when the Palme d'Or was created (was called the Grand Prix before). None of these was a $11'000 student film. (That's just for silly nitpicking. I completely agree with your basic comment).

• 1975 Chronique des années de braise de Mohammed Lakdhar-Hamina
• 1976 Taxi Driver de Martin Scorsese
• 1977 Padre padrone de Paolo & Vittorio Taviani
• 1978 L'arbre au sabots d'Ermanno Olmi
• 1979 Apocalypse now de Francis Ford Coppola
• 1979 Le tambour de Volker Schlondorff
• 1980 Kagemusha d'Akira Kurosawa
• 1980 Que le spectacle commence de Bob Fosse
• 1981 L'homme de fer d'Andrej Wajda
• 1982 Missing de Costa-Gavras
• 1982 Yol d'Yilmas Güney
• 1983 La ballade de Narayama de Shohei Imamura
• 1984 Paris, Texas de Wim Wenders
• 1985 Papa est en voyage d'affaires d'Emir Kustrica
• 1986 Mission de Roland Joffé
• 1987 Sous le soleil de Satan de Maurice Pialat
• 1988 Pelle le conquérant de Bille August
• 1989 Sexe, mensonge et vidéo de Steven Soderbergh
• 1990 Sailor et Lula de David Lynch
• 1991 Barton Fink de Joël & Ethan Coen
• 1992 Les meilleurs intentions de Bille August
• 1993 Adieu ma concubine de Chen Kaige
• 1993 La leçon de piano de Jane Campion
• 1994 Pulp fiction de Quentin Tarantino
• 1995 Underground d'Emir Kusturica
• 1996 Secrets et mensonges de Mike Leigh
• 1997 L'anguille de Shohei Imamura
• 1997 Le goût de la cerise d'Abbas Kiarostami
• 1998 L'éternité et un jour de Théo Angelopoulos
• 1999 Rosetta de Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne
• 2000 Dancer in the dark de Lars Von Trier
• 2001 La chambre du fils de Nanni Moretti
• 2002 Le pianiste de Roman Polanski
• 2003 Elephant de Gus Van Sant
• 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11 de Michael Moore

(source: http://www.ifrance.com/cinemaetcie/CANNES.htm)

You Left out the Best Editing Package

[Ada_Rules]

...Adobe? Please. In the PC world nothing beats Sony Vegas these days. The DVD authoring component is pretty average but Vegas/Windows is arguably the strongest competition to Final Cut/Mac... I just wish they would at least port their network render engine (if not the whole thing) to Linux so I could add my Webserver into the render farm pool...

I've seen some demo's of Vegas working with some of the under $5k prosumer HD cams and it is amazing.

This was originally made by Sonic Foundry (of Soundforge fame) but the company was bougt by Sony a year or two ago. Surprisingly they have not appears to break this family of tools.