Film Schools and Technology
Last year I was interviewed for a major magazine about my perspective on Film Schools and changing Technology. At the time i had not long taken over the role of Head of Technological Arts at the International Film School Sydney and so considering what new technology meant for Film School was at the front of my headspace. So of course I launch into detailed and deliberately provocative answers to the magazine interviewer's questions; passionate and errudite articulations.... which of course was watered to a spare few sentences in the actual article... So rather than let all that blater go to waste I have decided to post the interview here in its full form.
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1. How do you see existing film schools coping with changing technology?To be frank, Very Poorly. The evolving nature of cinematic production, the structure of education institutions and the culture of Digital Native students, are all colliding in a set of disjointed agendas and imperatives that leave many film schools struggling for relevance.
Cinema production technologies, and the processes that stem from them, are in dramatic upheaval. After several decades of largely consistent modes of production and delivery, we now have a very different landscape for both making and experiencing cinema one that is multi-platform and scalable rather than unified and singular.
These changes are much more than just new, fast and cheap software and cameras; but are most profoundly seen in the filmmaking process and structure itself. The long established divisions between pre-production, production and post-production have become, in many ways, arbitrary distinctions, almost irrelevant divisions. DOPs continue to shoot with virtual cameras after the set has been struck. Shots are re-lit in post-production. Colour Grading is as much a pre-production process of design as a post-production process of manipulation. A whole film may begin and end inside a computer, never employing a camera at all. The simple, and previously clear, distinctions about when different production roles begin and end has dissolved into a infinitely flexible, project by project, set of options rather than defined set of structures.
Its in this fundamentally different environment that we have a plethora of education institutions teaching filmmaking who are still deeply entrenched in how cinema has Been rather that what it Is, and what it will Become. We have Film Schools whose curriculum is built around structures, processes and systems of cinema assembly that are losing relevance everyday.
And into this we launch Digital Native students, students who do not remember a time before the Mouse and Keyboard and for whom digital rip, burn, mash, upload is engrained into their psyche. These students have laptops perpetually under their arm that are more powerful than the SGI systems of less than 10 years ago. When you speak of an offline process is it any wonder they simply look at you funny? Why would you offline when you can online HD on a laptop? The idea simply does not compute to them. And nor should it! The imperative for pre-existing and rigid structures for cinema production are simply lost on these Digital Native students who come from a fundamentally different mind set to their often Digital Immigrant teachers.
The result of this clash between changing production processes, the outdated perspectives of much film education in the 21st century and the internal logic of the digital culture of students, far too often manifests itself in very poor teaching pedagogy. Too often film schools, in an effort to cope with the techno-cultural onslaught, have supplanted the teaching of real skills and knowledge and craft of filmmaking, with software-specific brand loyalty.
Any institution that teaches software specific functions above, or worse, in place of core creative production processes is fundamentally dis-empowering their students and directly damaging the broader creative industry, making it slavishly adherent to corporate marketing directions rather than the needs and skill demands of production. Schools often fall this way in an effort simply to keep up with the technological change but sadly this leads to education institutions begining to appear more like technology trainers than Film Schools; creating software-users rather than Editors, camera operators rather than Cinematographers.
2. How do you believe film schools should be coping with changing technology in order to attract film students and provide the proper training in all fields the school aims to teach?This is certainly no simple question and the answer has to be multifaceted. The first is that film schools need to let go of any attachment they have to traditional hierarchies of delivery related to technology.
For far too long cinematic educators, distributors, broadcasters and media-makers themselves have institutionalized a hierarchy of privilege in regard to the delivery of cinematic content - the cinema theatrical release at the top and a pyramidal chain down from there. This has drilled into being an absurd concept that the ultimate destination is projected large screen cinema and everything else is second rate. This maddening perspective ingrains compositional aesthetic choices around one mode despite the fact that the work itself may, and invariably will, ultimately be seen in many modes. Not to mention the fact that it is widely known that big studios treat theatrical release as simply part of the advertising campaign for DVD sales.
This hierarchy of perception must be let go of by the institutions that teach film making. The future of cinema is multi-platform delivery across an unprecedented diversity of delivery platforms - large and small. Thus we need to be instilling in the new generation of film makers the compositional, aesthetic and technical sophistication to be able to create moving image media that engages and exploits this environment and these opportunities rather than ignore or rally against them in an irrelevant air of quality perception. The future is not High Definition, the future is All Definition, where all frame sizes are equally acceptable and viable for both acquisition and delivery in concert with their contexts; from the theatre, to the home theatre, to the game console to the mobile phone.
In concert with this, the other major factor that is profoundly effecting filmmaker culture is the raw efficiency of production that not just allows, but in many ways demands, an holistic and integrated skill set in filmmakers themselves. This is not to say that every filmmaker has to be a expert in every part of filmmaking, there will always be specialists and cinema will always be a collaborative art, but the environment that young filmmakers land in the moment they pick up a camera in the digital age is one where self-sufficiency is the means to a career and the means to fulfilling creative vision.
Sitting by the phone waiting for the agent or studio to call to give you permission to make a film is not only a dying paradigm but a wholly undesirable one to filmmakers embedded in the idea of owning the means of production. In the 21st century owning your own fully professional camera and editing system is as simple as a credit card expense and the means to deliver to a mass global audience is a monthly internet connection cost. This environment has never existed before for filmmakers. Subsequently, a film school that isnt teaching students how to produce, fund, shoot, direct, edit, sound mix and, most importantly, Deliver their own self-devised projects, is one that is fundamentally failing their students.
Film schools can best prepare their students to take advantage of the opportunities the digital age offers by educating them to be well-rounded, holistically thinking and broadly skilled. They should have such a curriculum that endeavours to empower students to understand every aspect of filmmaking rather than the traditional specialization model of departments that function in a silo mentality. This kind of teaching simply creates filmmakers ready for a film making culture that is gone and ill-prepared for what is to come.
The core ideal we aim for at The International Film School Sydney is to create filmmakers for whom technology is transparent. This is not to say that everyone is an expert at everything, but rather that every student that we teach achieves a position where their conceptual understanding of technology is transparent to their creative vision; where What they want to make is never limited or hamstrung by a lack of technical understanding.
3. In what ways do you believe the industry has changed most since your film school was founded?The International Film School Sydney is a very new school, being only a few years old, so in many ways it was founded and developed to be as in-touch as possible with contemporary thinking about production and, in particular, creative technologies. And yet even in the short time the school has been open there have been significant shifts. Among the most significant to effect the way skills and processes are taught is the simple fact of choice. Whilst there have always been different types of cameras, different types of editing systems for cinema production, the truth is that they were remarkably unified and very consistent. Whilst there were choices between film stock or lenses there is now a far more open slather of options for how to both acquire and process an image than ever before. Every year delivers new recording formats, new camera types, new software tools.
The biggest challenge for a film school is obviously staying up to date and contemporary with technology which can be a major logistic and costly exercise. But beyond costs, the key challenge to the way the industry changed is the focus on workflow options. Even within the International Film School Sydney we have as part of our modest in-house facilities more than six different camera types and between them those cameras can generate more than a fifteen different recording formats. On top of this we have tape, hard drive and solid-state recording media, each with its own acquisition demands and an array of lenses, adapters, monitors and accessory options. And thats before we get into post where we have three different editing systems, three composition/fx tools, three audio production systems, four delivery and encoding tools, various options for colour correction and grading and a host of plug-ins and extensions. And of course within all these a host of different workflow process options; namely digital intermediates, proxy-editing and on-line/offline.
This kind of massive diversity (and the inherent flexibility that goes with it) is at the heart of the contemporary industry and so needs to be at the heart of how and what we teach. To be an effective filmmaker in this landscape means being empowered with the ability to make clear and informed choices about the right tool and process for the project.
4. What unique or otherwise tailored classes are offered by your film school in order to keep up with changes in film production and the technology that accompanies it?We dont have specific classes as such to deal with technology changes and evolutions, rather we take an holistic approach of integrating the discussion, use and evaluation of technology in every class. The approach we take is that Cinema IS Technology, that it does not and cannot exist without technology. Subsequently there is no such thing as a non-technical filmmaker.
On a simple level we avoid at all costs becoming a technology training school. We aim to teach our students to be EDITORS not Final Cut Pro or Avid USERS; we teach them to be CINEMATOGRAPHERS not Sony or Panasonic CAMERA OPERATORS. We do this by ensuring that we are never teaching just one type or brand of technology, that students are constantly forced to take what they know and apply it in functional ways to a piece of equipment or software they have never used before. Our hope is that our students gain from this the ability to teach themselves which is far and away the most important skill of all.
This embedding of technology covers every facet of what we teach, not just the obvious camera and editing but right through to screenwriting and producing. At many other film schools there is a hard line in the sand between what is considered technical and non-technical, we make no such distinction. As result the first thing all students learn to use is Celtx, an open-source integrated screenwriting and pre-production system. A tool like Celtx goes far beyond just correct formatting of a screenplay to become a complete project management system - from script break down to scheduling. In teaching these dedicated Celtx courses on screenplay formatting, project management, script break-down, digital annotation and review, online collaboration and exchange systems that are built into Celtx, we immediately immerse our students in two crucial understandings about cinema production. The first is simply that idea that technology is not an add-on to cinema, it is what cinema IS at every level and that this technology is a tool that is hugely empowering. The second is that, by teaching our students about how to construct, breakdown and manage a project using a versatile digital tool, we are able to impress on them the power of pragmatism. A great idea is useless if it cant be realised so great cinema comes when great ideas meet effective pragmatism that allows the vision to be made into a tangible cinematic work.
These concepts that we are able to teach with Celtx right from the inception of the course empower students with an ongoing perspective of flexibility and integration in their relationship with technology. But starting with technology as an enabler to writing and producing they are positioned to view technology as a weapon not an obstacle.
5. Does your film school own/offer the use of any specialized moviemaking equipment? If so, please explain which equipment it is that is available to students and why this is significant for a film school.The International Film School has taken a very specific approach to the technology we have in-house for students to learn on and use for productions. Our focus is on educating independent, self sufficient, proactive filmmakers making unique and individual cinema in all its forms. As such we have chosen our collection of equipment - including both hardware and software, cameras and computers on the idea that there should be nothing in the school that isnt immediately cost effective and accessible to the students themselves to own their own means of production. In practical terms this means we focus on flexible, cost-effective systems rather than the traditional expensive and inaccessible ones. By the time they graduate most of our students already own their own camera and computer setups and are ready to be proactive filmmakers. As such we focus our resources on these same tools of production; the off-the-shelf efficient and flexible tools of the 21st century rather than the expensive and inefficient ones of the 20th.
We actively promote the DIY aesthetic of improvisation and adaptation because it is these skills that are at the heart of filmmaking at any budget. We see no viable rationale for teaching filmmaking on tools that the students themselves couldnt afford to buy and are unlikely even to come in contact with for the first few years of their careers.
What this also allows us to offer our students is a deeply immersive film education that is constantly centred around the facilitation of doing and making Not waiting and watching. The school can field upwards of six simultaneous productions of substantial and effective resources and this equipment, by virtue of its light, efficient portability, is available to students seven days a week for any projects they desire.
Posted at 11:10AM May 13, 2009
by Mike Jones in media education |
