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. :)

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.