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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."
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, 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.
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.
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.