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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."
Shoot, when I was a film major in my first year of college, I was stunned to find out that seniors were spending 12-15 thousand dollars on their final film projects. Recently, I had the privilege to see some of the recent films of some current film students and I was really quite pleased to see what was possible with even iMovie, a DV camera and an iMac. Beyond that, for about 66% of what we would have spent on our senior projects just a few years ago, you can practically have an entire G5 editing studio.
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"But technology does not make a great film. The story does."
Sure, you've got a point, and so I'm nnot surprised your post was modded "insightful."
But technology does allow a filmmaker to tell a story which might not have been possible without it. And honestly, one could say that film isn't "necessary" to tell a story- words will do. Film is a technology, and I'm sure that when movies were invented, somebody vocally lamented that storytelling would die. It hasn't.
New technology, used judiciously, simply expands the boundaries of what's possible.
the whole industry was moving to Apple's Final Cut Pro
1. The whole industry is not low-budget independent movies cut on the director's personal Mac.
Avid is still the major editing equipment, be it in television or for film. What percentage of major hollywood movies are cut on FCP? My guess would be something between 1 and 10%?
But, more important is
2. The equipment used is irrelevant. Editing is not the skill of pressing the right buttons. They could learn it on an old Steenbeck: no technology at all, absolutely nothing to learn other than how to tell the story, and how to cut it well. Instead, they loose probably more than half the time learning technical details which change anyway as the tools change, and which they could learn in the relevant user manual when they need it.
3. Separate from editing, some basic technology lessons would certainly be useful, and not only for editors. But for the technical aspects, they shouldn't be taught Avid OR FCP. They should be taught some very basic computer stuff (I know young filmmakers who don't really know what a hard disk is! or a directory/folder), and basic non-linear editing principles, and an overview of both Avid AND FCP, because in the real world they will be using both for a while, and then maybe something else.
There are already far too many "editors" who only know pressing the right buttons very quickly, but don't have a clue about how to build a good film out of the material the director brought into the editing room.