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

Re:iMovie

[denthijs]

A bit OT but very illustrational:
to see some great examples of low budget moviemaking visit http://channel101.com/
Once you've seen SockBaby: http://channel101.com/view.php?media_id=121 you'll know why they carry the subtitle: The Unavoidable Future of Entertainment
Enjoy

The Age of Independant

[dshaw858]

I don't think that this is just student movies, but rather all independant movies. More and more I've been seeing independant films- and they look good, and are actually good movies. A programmer friend of mine in Santa Barbera even had his hobby/independant film play in a theatre. I'm happy that finally you don't need a giant budget to produce a nice film.

- dshaw

Unfortunately..

[sakusha]

Unfortunately, USC made a huge investment in PC-based Avid workstations, just at the time the whole industry was moving to Apple's Final Cut Pro. But it proves something I've been saying for many years: college will only train you on the LAST generation's tools, which may or may not prepare you for the NEXT generation tools that you'll be working with for the rest of your career. Better to study theory and fundamentals than expect a college to equip you with actual skills, you have to develop those on the job anyway.

Re:Unfortunately..

[Anonymous Coward]

depends on the school,I'm a film student getting to work with Final cut HD on g4's and G5's, I am getting hands on experience with professional quality equipment. But i've learned a lot more about making films by actually making them, rather than talking about the theory behind them. That may be unique to my school, but i like they're tendency to hire people who've worked in the field, or are still working in the field to come and teach our classes because they can keep us up to date on what the technology trends are in the fields we're trying to get into. BTW, I attend Cal State Monterey Bay, our film department isn't called film, they decided to name it "Teledramatic art and technology" and no, teledramatic is not a word. there are schools out there that are making the effort to prepare you for the current and future industry.

Re:Same ol' same ol'...

[Mycroft_VIII]

Minor side nitpick, but I consider sketching and computer graphics different mediums. I've known people who could do wonders with one or the other medium but not both despite thier best efforts.
I've very little ability to draw by hand(or any other way to be honest), but somtimes my digital 'stick figures' actually resemble somthing kinda like what I intended, my hand drawn messes usually look best wadded up in the trash.
But then there are some who think painting is art and photography is just artless technology for those who can't do art.

Mycroft

Student films all SUCK... (well mostly)

[mustardayonnaise]

I graduated from USC Cinema about 3 years ago, just as all these wonderful toys were being set up. My experience with student filmmaking is this:

Many of the students there would spend boatloads of money on their thesis projects to put them on 35mm Anamorphic film, get a Dolby Digital mix, put in glitzy special effects, etc... (one I helped out on had a $100K budget - no joke). The problem was that their films ended up looking like beautiful pieces of nothing, because they had spent so much time on production issues that they never had time to really nail down the script. So they were great to look at, always technically proficient, but lacking in story. So to have SCFX is great for people who want a technical training, but I went to USC to understand visual storytelling, and you really don't need much in the way of effects to do that properly.

As a side note, a classmate of mine (he was a few semesters ahead of me) spent a minimal $11,000 on his thesis film, shot it on 16mm black and white, optical sound, and it won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Go figure.

speaking of amateur films....

[Greenrider]

If you're interested in what can be done on extremely small budgets, check out a movie called Primer.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/primer .h tml
http://www.primermovie.com/home.html

Primer is a time-travel sci fi flick that was made for about $4000, shot entirely on super 16, and here's the best part: it won the Grand Jury award for best drama at Sundance this year. From the buzz I hear, it could be this year's Memento.

Robert Rodriguez shot El Mariachi for $7000 (http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter1993/maria chi_budget.php), and it got him a million-dollar production deal with Columbia. He went on to make Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, From Dusk Till Dawn, and the Spy Kids movies. He wrote a great book called Rebel Without a Crew about the experience of making El Mariachi on a shoestring budget.

If you don't have $4000 or $7000 to spend on a movie, how about $217? That's what Tarnation (http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/tarnati on.html) was made for. The director put it together from home movies shot on Super 8 and edited it with iMovie.

Re:Palme d'Or?

[Anonymous Coward]

He was probably talking about the Palme d'Or du court metrage (short film), which was given to a USC student in 2001. It took about 15 seconds to google for "USC palme d'or" and figure this out.