Hi Filmmaking Lounge Fam!
Mine was all three, and in that order.
I grew up in a rural midwestern town where filmmaking was an abstract and wild dream, the kind of thing that happened somewhere else to someone else. So it started at the video store. My town had both a Blockbuster AND a Family Video, and I was in both constantly, but Family Video was close enough that I could skateboard or rollerblade there when I was nine. That was the whole education for a while. Walking the aisles, reading the backs of boxes, deciding what to spend my one rental on.
Then in middle school I got hold of my mom's old video camera, and it moved to the backyard. I was notorious for having a camera of some kind glued to my hand through middle school and high school. Which means that as an adult I have countless hours of old tapes and digital files of me and my friends. Some of it I love. Some of it makes me absolutely cringe. All of it I'm glad I still have.
Then film school. I went to the nearest production-focused program I could find that would still let me take a bus home every few weeks to see the boy. Because there was a boy, and he always factored in. That landed me in Chicago, where for the first time in my life I was surrounded by people who were just as obsessed as I was, if not more, with the crazy thing I'd been chasing my whole life.
I know I was lucky to get all three. Most people don't, and plenty of the best filmmakers I've met got exactly one.
So which was yours?
Was it a video store, a library, a particular movie channel at 2am? Was it a backyard, a borrowed camera, a friend who agreed to be in everything? Was it a classroom, a workshop, a mentor, a set you talked your way onto? Was it finding Stage 32?
And here's the part I'm most curious about: what did that specific education give you that you don't think you'd have gotten any other way?
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Great post, Ellie. my film school was never a classroom -it was the screen itself. years of watching films, studying why certain scenes work, writing my own stories, making mistakes, and trying again. I’m still learning with every project I create. for me, the best education has been turning ideas into something real instead of only keeping them in my head. glad to connect with people here who have taken completely different roads into filmmaking.
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Hi, Ashley Renée Smith! Mine was a classroom in 12th grade. I found part of a script online and looked up a screenwriting article or two. I think it was computer class. I didn't know anything about screenwriting before then.
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For me film school was Blockbuster Video, cable and going to the movies. I can always remember always being a fan of movies but the more I would watch I really started to notice things like the framing of shots, how using color, lighting and music could enhance a story. It was just something that always played around in my head. When our family finally got a camcorder, going way back now LOL, I would volunteer to be the one filming family parties and using that time to try and replicate the shots I would see in my favorite movies.
With dvd's, again dating myself, I think I loved the "bonus features" sometimes more than the movie. I would love to see hoe directors like Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino, Michael Mann and John Carpenter would write and story then bring it to life. One day something finally clicked inside and I said "what the hell, write a movie." So, do I wish I gone to a formal film school, I don't know, this way is all I know but I do wish that I had started sooner.
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For me it was a prison! I got permission from the dept of transportation who owned a 3 acre abandoned minimum security prison that sat on about 47 acres in my town, to have carte blanche access to the property until it was demolished. I would go and sit on the rooftops, in the guard towers, and in the cells with a pad of paper and write stories. Then we would try things out. How to fall off a roof. How to fall off a cliff. How to film an action chase sequence. How to blend two locations together. Things we see that we nowadays just hire other experienced professionals to do, but then we could test things out, edit them, improve on them until it looked believable and edited together. We did this for two years until the prison was torn down. (and the demolition team let us incorporate the demolishing into our stories, so we had incredibly beautiful production value of destruction). Any boys playground. Nothing like first hand experience and freedom.
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Before film school, it was a film program called Cine Club at the university I attended. Every Friday evening, they showed 16mm classics -- foreign and domestic -- and I soaked it all in. It was the catalyst that erased my dreams of becoming a lawyer and sent me to film school.
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My film school was mostly classrooms. Drama classes performing monologues and scenes, playing the game Switch which was a lot like the Meisner technique where we just had to begin a scene and the other person just had to go with it, seeing movies in English classes after we read To Kill A Mockingbird and Rebel Without A Cause. I also loved watching movies since I was a teen. I'd often watch Family channel, TBS, Bravo, and watch a lot of movies that ranged from the '50s through the '90s. I think in drama class I got techniques taught to me that were never taught in film or theater classes in university as the university classes focused more on theory than acting. Even though it seemed like a setback when things closed down during the pandemic and I couldn't attend open mic nights, several youtube channels, facebook groups, film challenges as well as stage32 were available with plenty of information to learn from which helped me to stay motivated and to learn even more about the craft.
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I grew up in west Texas. It wasn't the end of the earth, but you could see it from there. My film school was small town theatres, drive-in movies, television (black & white, of course), and an affiliation as an actor in a community theatre. My parents saw to it that I got exposure to Broadway shows, many of which became movies. We have a large collection of movies that kept us entertained during the COVID pandemic. Growing up, art imitated life. That seems to be reversing somewhat, but I continue to look for those films that evoke real feelings. So, as many readers of this will have guessed, I am so old that I can remember when sex was dirty, and the air was clean. Regards == Barry
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I had an unusual route. I went to film school, but studied dramatic writing. So I got a lot of story theory and the language of cinema, but no production whatsoever. I also got a lot of schooling by watching westerns and war movies with my father, classic story structure. I only later went to production school by working on sets. My first time producing, I'd never been on a set before. Trial by fire, but eventually I did every job on a set except for hair and makeup. Rough way to learn, but man has it helped me as a filmmaker.
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I grew up in Appalachia in the 1970s and got interested in films at an early age through the old and more recent movies constantly being shown in television. Our local public library had a collection of 8mm home films from a company called Blackhawk of old silent Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and DW Griffith films that I checked out regularly and studied on our cheap home movie projector. I couldn't really afford movie film, so I would do "remixes" of films I recorded off of television with a hand-me-down 1960s reel to reel tape recorder, reediting the movies to tell a different story or combining different movies together.
In college, I majored in Public and Applied History, focusing on media history and film courses, hoping to work in an archives, but I needed a graduate degree for that. After college, I was laid off from my job because of the crappy Gulf War economy, which ended my intentions of saving up money to go to grad school.
So, my "hands on" film school, was going in debt on my credit card and independently shooting and editing three feature-length documentaries, editing them on a primitive desktop computer digital video editing system I assembled from scratch. My first documentary was the first feature-length digital video work completely edited and output from Adobe Premiere and I worked with a beta tester for Adobe to pull it together.
I eventually went to work in a university, teaching faculty how to improve their own teaching. On a practical level, I was able to use the skills I learned in filmmaking to help faculty when the started creating video for their own courses (and eventually for streaming classes) starting in the early 2000s.
I kept up screenwriting and researching and writing about film and broadcast tv/radio history as a hobby. Now that I'm retired, I'm focusing on some screenplays and tv pilots I've developed the past few years.
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Great post mine goes back to 1984 my brother had an old cine camara and we made a film ( The Golden Wheel) we only had a 7 min real , it was a Bruce Lee stlye action and had to do it all with my brother in law filming, my sister doing the sound effects eg. gun shots using a live 12 bore shotgun and my brother and me doing the action, all on our family farm where we grew up, we did put a copy on video years ago, fast forward to 2 years ago I wrote my first novel ( Echoes of Atlantis The Legacy of the Gods) and decided to make a film version using the latest technology and a lot of AI, I made a 30min film also called ( Echoes of Atantis The Legacy of the Gods) but have had to cut a lot out of the book to get it down to 30 mins, it's now doing the film festival circuit in 12 festivals around the world , but waiting to hear if it gets selected by them for a screening between now and August 2027. will definaitely make more films and more books in the future .
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Kind of All 3 My Film School was DVD stores, Theater Backstage working, Personally Connecting with Associates and Co Directors before beginning to work for guidance, Film Making Institutions were 0.001%
Randy if you grew up in Appalachia what are your thoughts on a controversial film at the time, but probably would not even be made today, at least not in our the crazy Woke world we live in today. This is the film that proved once a for all that John Voit CHARACTER (the protagonist of the film) can actually ACT, AND IS NOT JUST A PRETTY FACE!