This WAS a huge topic to try to cover, but who of us has time to read more that what you posted Ben!! It was a very good assessment and I wish I had used the term "maybe" more often. My answer is usually NO, Film School is not worth it. I recommend Business School because that puts the student in an very good position to understand the business elements of film making - the creative things CAN be learned on the job, while you are carrying coffee for the right person or persons. I know that the perfect job is not always available so you need to do ANYTHING you can - and try to evolve from there. But well worth the attempt. I went the business school route and ended up irreplaceable because I was surrounded by wonderful creatives, all of whom could be replaced by less experienced (read: cheaper, less combative) creatives. I was the only one who could do both creative and business - so ended up the "candy shop owner" who could not be replaced when my company was sold over and over and over to bigger and bigger and bigger entertainment companies. That is "my path" and I know there are many. But "film school" is not the only "school" that benefits those who want to create and learn. To the screenwriter teacher: YOU teach the key element of entertainment: writing down your idea!! I usually encourage potential film school students to learn to write!! Write, Write, Write. Unless you write, you will always be looking for a job - usually from someone who does write! If you write, you can create your own job! Sell your own project, instead of someone else's, Hire yourself. Control your future. That, to me, is the END game.
I don't know much about American film schools. I did a presentation on Branded Entertainment at Chapman a couple of years ago, so I assumed they are quite commercially oriented. But I went to film school in Babelsberg, Germany and I can tell you, at least back then, they saw themselves as an art school. It wasn't about getting the students ready for earning a living, it was about creating art. They did a graduate study back then and discovered that 90% of the graduates didn't work in the industry at all, 9% worked in TV and 1% in film. Now, I'm teaching a Social Media Marketing course for the film students at a University for Applied Sciences in Austria and they are definitely very future-oriented and practical. So maybe film schools need to focus more on the commercial side of the business and less on the art side. The running gag at my film school was that the production students only learn how to fill out funding requests.
Historically, when people ask me if they should go to film school I give the same answer: yes, if your parents are paying for it. And I’m kind of being shitty and kind of being serious.
My background: studied English Literature and Theater in college, spent an unreasonable amount of time working on a public access tv show and making short films while taking a few film classes, realized movies were my greatest passion of many, pursued that professionally. However, the 5 (oops) years I spent focused on learning storytelling? Priceless.
So… is there direct ROI to film school generally speaking? I don’t know. Will there be ROI to film school, or whatever it should be called, in the future? I don’t know. Can you learn everything you would learn in school from working in the business or just doing it and failing a bunch? Yes.
BUT. To Ben’s point, the time you get to focus on learning when you aren’t also trying to actively produce a commercial product? Man… that’s still really valuable. Even if you’re just leaning the classics and not learning the business.
I was reading James Joyce, Herman Melville, Henry James, and studying Lacan and feel like THAT was valuable to my life in film (movies? Digits? What is it now?). So… should film schools adapt to the every changing media landscape we live in or face irrelevance? To a certain extent, yes.
But there’s always relevance in learning the classics and maybe “film” school should be treated like fine arts school, and then there should be more entrepreneurial and technical programs that are more fluid in nature and give people that education.
And maybe some people should just post a shitload of videos and learn from audience feedback, and other people who would spend their parents money on film school should instead drop that cash on a year of living expenses to build a “creator” body of work and then run with it or go shopping that skill set around.
If someone is taking on student loans, they should only do it because they feel they need to learn what’s being taught. Not because they think a degree will get them a job in this industry. It won’t.
Short version: there’s room and a need for ALL these types of cinematic arts educations, and plenty of opportunity for the people who forgo it and just make things.
One thing I do know: not once when getting a movie greenlit, commercial awarded, or any other project going has a single person asked me to see my degree or asked if I went to film school.
But that doesn’t mean 4 straight years of studying movies wouldn’t have benefited me the rest of my life.
At this point it really comes down to your personality and your financial reality. If you thrive on structure, need a guided path with tools and feedback, and see academia as central to your sense of worth, then film school makes sense. But if you can’t afford it, or if you’d rather carve out your own path using today’s tools, that’s completely valid too. Just know the difference: calling yourself a filmmaker means understanding storytelling fundamentals like the hero’s journey and the core grammar of film. Shooting a few sci-fi clips under ten seconds isn’t filmmaking. That’s content. That’s video production.
Really well put! As an early adopter of AI (and young emerging writer) this is exactly how I felt in the summer of 2023.
The pipelines that used to nurture and develop emerging talent like me don’t exist anymore. So, I’m all-in on AI as a tool to help produce my ideas and showcase what stories I want to tell.
I went to one of the schools you mentioned. I have leaned NO unless you can afford it. However it was some of the funnest -yet naive - times of my life because it was making movies, talking movies , watching movies 24/7. If I had to do it all over again, I would go with more intention rather than discovery. It’s too expensive to figure out if you want this or not. I saw several classmates go through this. My favorite part you stated was that fundamentals don’t go away no matter what visual medium you’re discussing. But the business decisions you need to make have changed. Now theres all this information out there - yes a lot of it is questionable- but you can find it. I agree it’s defines more of a maybe choice now than ever before. Thanks for this!
I like “Storytelling for Screens” or “Visual Storytelling” but that second one could also imply it’s also for the stage…
I reserve some skepticism for these creator camp type places. At least based on their marketing, it seems like they think that creators have all the answers, and that Hollywood better watch out because they’re coming for us…
I think classically trained filmmakers have so much to offer in terms of narrative storytelling that’s missing from the creator economy.
I think the answer falls somewhere in the opportunity ocean I described a couple posts ago. It’s in that “AND” that we’ll find the next generation of great storytellers.
I literally just sent your article to my son who decided to study “cinematic arts” as a major at university of Hawaii when I work in the biz in Burbank. I think their antiquated program is a costly mistake.
the Best you can do is make sure that he uses the time wisely to point his career in the direction of where the biz is headed and not where most schools point their students.
What I find most interesting is where you get to toward the end regarding Broadway.
I grew up a theatre kid. I’m trained in theatre, though that was training received through mentorship and experience rather than school. Everything I’ve ever done in the cinematic arts (work in post on TV, produce four indie features, create and produce an audio drama) has been learn as I go, on my own, without anyone guiding me forward. Which I think is a little more where education is generally headed, not just in storytelling, but in all fields. That’s a separate conversation.
What I find interesting about what you’re saying here is that film, tv, the cinematic arts generally can (and needs to) learn from how theatre kept itself from dying with the advent of the talkies. There’s an enormous think piece in this statement. But to boil it down, the reason theatre has survived and Broadway is at its most profitable can be summed up as: 1) the education programs from pre-K to post-grad are legion; 2) community theatre is where the bulk of the art form is practiced and people spend a lot of time and energy both supporting and trying to get onto Broadway; and 3) a willingness to allow itself to be Disney-fied, meaning, Broadway is a theme park now, not just a place you go to see a show.
Theatre is not one skill that someone can master. It is an amalgamation of different skills, brought together to create and enhance a story FOR AN AUDIENCE. As my directing mentor is fond of saying “theatre happens in the air between the audience and the play. Before the audience is in the room, it’s just a rehearsal.” This is true of cinema as well. Before an audience is in the room, it’s just a cut. But once the audience arrives, you have a movie. The distinction matters. And the pattern does as well. Film is the same as theatre. It is just created with an application of different technologies (primarily having to do with the camera and the editing). But it is not a single skill you can master. It is a cooperation of artists of different mediums who make a film possible.
This is to illustrate a point. You talk in here about the idea of the name “film school” not being quite right anymore. You say that “cinematic arts” doesn’t quite hit it for you either, to which I would agree. Notice that I mentioned above that I have ventured into the space of audio drama. Definitely not visual, however the entire process was informed by and predicated off of my knowledge of film and TV, and even of theatre.
Now for some tough love: I think that there’s a class of people (many of whom went to film school or have a BFA or MFA in theatre) who can be snobbish about their artform. The conversations become isolated and restrictive and seek to serve only the initiated. One of the things we see right now is that Gen Z and younger don’t play that game. So the more older people try to hold onto a thing that seeks to force structure onto them, the more the kids are going to move against that thing. But, and here’s my larger point, the fact is that what theatre people and film people are trying to do is basically the same thing. So why don’t more of them work together to create the ecosystem for those things to thrive?
As you went into in depth, the tools change so frequently now that the syllabus may be moot before the end of a semester. But the idea of storytelling is as old as humanity itself. I feel like if we are trying to keep all of this relevant and to give young people a way into it, what we have to focus on is that storytelling is the core of what this industry does, and that the tools do not define it. AND! We have to hook them early. There’s an emphasis in film school being something you do when you’re out of high school. That has to change. Video production classes exist. Some of those even focus their time on storytelling, as opposed to reporting the news. But we need to do more to separate those two programs and to make accessible from a very young age the tools of cinema, the way that the tools of theatre are accessible to kids as young as 3 or 4.
My last point is this: it’s never going to be easy to predict which tools will take off and become dominant. However, I think one thing that storyteller academies could do better is push innovation, rather than sitting in the bubble of what the professional industry continues to derive its profit from. We are honestly sitting in a moment where all of this is going to shift dramatically. AI is part of it, but only a part. And not the one I think most people imagine. There are a half dozen or so technological developments that have been growing in the last decade especially that are going to be put together in the very near future (3 to 5 years) that will shift the way we tell stories into something completely new and completely interactive. Storytelling will cease to be a passive sit-in-a-chair-and-watch-it-unfold-in-front-of-you ordeal for audiences. Instead, you will go to a building and turn on a machine and you will live the story in real time, playing the central character of the piece to its outcome. Over time, the technology will grow to accommodate groups of friends going into these rooms together and playing the story out to its conclusion. The reason I bring this up is because I think there’s a ticking clock on figuring out how to keep filmmaking relevant in that society. It will not ever dominate culture again. The peak has peaked. But it can do what theatre did. And it should! But that’s going to require a lot of effort from a lot of people who are trying to restore something to a particular kind of glory. Educators can lead that shift.
Unless I've read this wrong, there's ONE mention of screenwriting in this post. Great for me > that's what I teach. Screenwriting for multiple platforms and media: EVERY Screen.
Agree Fred. this was such a big subject to tackle that I focused less on screenwriting than I wanted to. Obviously it's vital and a part of the foundations IMO and can track through every kind of content as it evolves. I was a screenwriter before I was a producer and at helped not only with developing scripts, but any kind of communication, marketing, all of it.
This WAS a huge topic to try to cover, but who of us has time to read more that what you posted Ben!! It was a very good assessment and I wish I had used the term "maybe" more often. My answer is usually NO, Film School is not worth it. I recommend Business School because that puts the student in an very good position to understand the business elements of film making - the creative things CAN be learned on the job, while you are carrying coffee for the right person or persons. I know that the perfect job is not always available so you need to do ANYTHING you can - and try to evolve from there. But well worth the attempt. I went the business school route and ended up irreplaceable because I was surrounded by wonderful creatives, all of whom could be replaced by less experienced (read: cheaper, less combative) creatives. I was the only one who could do both creative and business - so ended up the "candy shop owner" who could not be replaced when my company was sold over and over and over to bigger and bigger and bigger entertainment companies. That is "my path" and I know there are many. But "film school" is not the only "school" that benefits those who want to create and learn. To the screenwriter teacher: YOU teach the key element of entertainment: writing down your idea!! I usually encourage potential film school students to learn to write!! Write, Write, Write. Unless you write, you will always be looking for a job - usually from someone who does write! If you write, you can create your own job! Sell your own project, instead of someone else's, Hire yourself. Control your future. That, to me, is the END game.
Great post Ben! i've pulled so many quotes for my personal 'when the going gets tough' book of quotes!
Ha. You were one of my inspirations in film school so quid pro quo MJ!
I don't know much about American film schools. I did a presentation on Branded Entertainment at Chapman a couple of years ago, so I assumed they are quite commercially oriented. But I went to film school in Babelsberg, Germany and I can tell you, at least back then, they saw themselves as an art school. It wasn't about getting the students ready for earning a living, it was about creating art. They did a graduate study back then and discovered that 90% of the graduates didn't work in the industry at all, 9% worked in TV and 1% in film. Now, I'm teaching a Social Media Marketing course for the film students at a University for Applied Sciences in Austria and they are definitely very future-oriented and practical. So maybe film schools need to focus more on the commercial side of the business and less on the art side. The running gag at my film school was that the production students only learn how to fill out funding requests.
This one has me thinking.
Historically, when people ask me if they should go to film school I give the same answer: yes, if your parents are paying for it. And I’m kind of being shitty and kind of being serious.
My background: studied English Literature and Theater in college, spent an unreasonable amount of time working on a public access tv show and making short films while taking a few film classes, realized movies were my greatest passion of many, pursued that professionally. However, the 5 (oops) years I spent focused on learning storytelling? Priceless.
So… is there direct ROI to film school generally speaking? I don’t know. Will there be ROI to film school, or whatever it should be called, in the future? I don’t know. Can you learn everything you would learn in school from working in the business or just doing it and failing a bunch? Yes.
BUT. To Ben’s point, the time you get to focus on learning when you aren’t also trying to actively produce a commercial product? Man… that’s still really valuable. Even if you’re just leaning the classics and not learning the business.
I was reading James Joyce, Herman Melville, Henry James, and studying Lacan and feel like THAT was valuable to my life in film (movies? Digits? What is it now?). So… should film schools adapt to the every changing media landscape we live in or face irrelevance? To a certain extent, yes.
But there’s always relevance in learning the classics and maybe “film” school should be treated like fine arts school, and then there should be more entrepreneurial and technical programs that are more fluid in nature and give people that education.
And maybe some people should just post a shitload of videos and learn from audience feedback, and other people who would spend their parents money on film school should instead drop that cash on a year of living expenses to build a “creator” body of work and then run with it or go shopping that skill set around.
If someone is taking on student loans, they should only do it because they feel they need to learn what’s being taught. Not because they think a degree will get them a job in this industry. It won’t.
Short version: there’s room and a need for ALL these types of cinematic arts educations, and plenty of opportunity for the people who forgo it and just make things.
One thing I do know: not once when getting a movie greenlit, commercial awarded, or any other project going has a single person asked me to see my degree or asked if I went to film school.
But that doesn’t mean 4 straight years of studying movies wouldn’t have benefited me the rest of my life.
At this point it really comes down to your personality and your financial reality. If you thrive on structure, need a guided path with tools and feedback, and see academia as central to your sense of worth, then film school makes sense. But if you can’t afford it, or if you’d rather carve out your own path using today’s tools, that’s completely valid too. Just know the difference: calling yourself a filmmaker means understanding storytelling fundamentals like the hero’s journey and the core grammar of film. Shooting a few sci-fi clips under ten seconds isn’t filmmaking. That’s content. That’s video production.
Really well put! As an early adopter of AI (and young emerging writer) this is exactly how I felt in the summer of 2023.
The pipelines that used to nurture and develop emerging talent like me don’t exist anymore. So, I’m all-in on AI as a tool to help produce my ideas and showcase what stories I want to tell.
I went to one of the schools you mentioned. I have leaned NO unless you can afford it. However it was some of the funnest -yet naive - times of my life because it was making movies, talking movies , watching movies 24/7. If I had to do it all over again, I would go with more intention rather than discovery. It’s too expensive to figure out if you want this or not. I saw several classmates go through this. My favorite part you stated was that fundamentals don’t go away no matter what visual medium you’re discussing. But the business decisions you need to make have changed. Now theres all this information out there - yes a lot of it is questionable- but you can find it. I agree it’s defines more of a maybe choice now than ever before. Thanks for this!
I like “Storytelling for Screens” or “Visual Storytelling” but that second one could also imply it’s also for the stage…
I reserve some skepticism for these creator camp type places. At least based on their marketing, it seems like they think that creators have all the answers, and that Hollywood better watch out because they’re coming for us…
I think classically trained filmmakers have so much to offer in terms of narrative storytelling that’s missing from the creator economy.
I think the answer falls somewhere in the opportunity ocean I described a couple posts ago. It’s in that “AND” that we’ll find the next generation of great storytellers.
I literally just sent your article to my son who decided to study “cinematic arts” as a major at university of Hawaii when I work in the biz in Burbank. I think their antiquated program is a costly mistake.
🤷🏻♂️
the Best you can do is make sure that he uses the time wisely to point his career in the direction of where the biz is headed and not where most schools point their students.
What I find most interesting is where you get to toward the end regarding Broadway.
I grew up a theatre kid. I’m trained in theatre, though that was training received through mentorship and experience rather than school. Everything I’ve ever done in the cinematic arts (work in post on TV, produce four indie features, create and produce an audio drama) has been learn as I go, on my own, without anyone guiding me forward. Which I think is a little more where education is generally headed, not just in storytelling, but in all fields. That’s a separate conversation.
What I find interesting about what you’re saying here is that film, tv, the cinematic arts generally can (and needs to) learn from how theatre kept itself from dying with the advent of the talkies. There’s an enormous think piece in this statement. But to boil it down, the reason theatre has survived and Broadway is at its most profitable can be summed up as: 1) the education programs from pre-K to post-grad are legion; 2) community theatre is where the bulk of the art form is practiced and people spend a lot of time and energy both supporting and trying to get onto Broadway; and 3) a willingness to allow itself to be Disney-fied, meaning, Broadway is a theme park now, not just a place you go to see a show.
Theatre is not one skill that someone can master. It is an amalgamation of different skills, brought together to create and enhance a story FOR AN AUDIENCE. As my directing mentor is fond of saying “theatre happens in the air between the audience and the play. Before the audience is in the room, it’s just a rehearsal.” This is true of cinema as well. Before an audience is in the room, it’s just a cut. But once the audience arrives, you have a movie. The distinction matters. And the pattern does as well. Film is the same as theatre. It is just created with an application of different technologies (primarily having to do with the camera and the editing). But it is not a single skill you can master. It is a cooperation of artists of different mediums who make a film possible.
This is to illustrate a point. You talk in here about the idea of the name “film school” not being quite right anymore. You say that “cinematic arts” doesn’t quite hit it for you either, to which I would agree. Notice that I mentioned above that I have ventured into the space of audio drama. Definitely not visual, however the entire process was informed by and predicated off of my knowledge of film and TV, and even of theatre.
Now for some tough love: I think that there’s a class of people (many of whom went to film school or have a BFA or MFA in theatre) who can be snobbish about their artform. The conversations become isolated and restrictive and seek to serve only the initiated. One of the things we see right now is that Gen Z and younger don’t play that game. So the more older people try to hold onto a thing that seeks to force structure onto them, the more the kids are going to move against that thing. But, and here’s my larger point, the fact is that what theatre people and film people are trying to do is basically the same thing. So why don’t more of them work together to create the ecosystem for those things to thrive?
As you went into in depth, the tools change so frequently now that the syllabus may be moot before the end of a semester. But the idea of storytelling is as old as humanity itself. I feel like if we are trying to keep all of this relevant and to give young people a way into it, what we have to focus on is that storytelling is the core of what this industry does, and that the tools do not define it. AND! We have to hook them early. There’s an emphasis in film school being something you do when you’re out of high school. That has to change. Video production classes exist. Some of those even focus their time on storytelling, as opposed to reporting the news. But we need to do more to separate those two programs and to make accessible from a very young age the tools of cinema, the way that the tools of theatre are accessible to kids as young as 3 or 4.
My last point is this: it’s never going to be easy to predict which tools will take off and become dominant. However, I think one thing that storyteller academies could do better is push innovation, rather than sitting in the bubble of what the professional industry continues to derive its profit from. We are honestly sitting in a moment where all of this is going to shift dramatically. AI is part of it, but only a part. And not the one I think most people imagine. There are a half dozen or so technological developments that have been growing in the last decade especially that are going to be put together in the very near future (3 to 5 years) that will shift the way we tell stories into something completely new and completely interactive. Storytelling will cease to be a passive sit-in-a-chair-and-watch-it-unfold-in-front-of-you ordeal for audiences. Instead, you will go to a building and turn on a machine and you will live the story in real time, playing the central character of the piece to its outcome. Over time, the technology will grow to accommodate groups of friends going into these rooms together and playing the story out to its conclusion. The reason I bring this up is because I think there’s a ticking clock on figuring out how to keep filmmaking relevant in that society. It will not ever dominate culture again. The peak has peaked. But it can do what theatre did. And it should! But that’s going to require a lot of effort from a lot of people who are trying to restore something to a particular kind of glory. Educators can lead that shift.
Unless I've read this wrong, there's ONE mention of screenwriting in this post. Great for me > that's what I teach. Screenwriting for multiple platforms and media: EVERY Screen.
Agree Fred. this was such a big subject to tackle that I focused less on screenwriting than I wanted to. Obviously it's vital and a part of the foundations IMO and can track through every kind of content as it evolves. I was a screenwriter before I was a producer and at helped not only with developing scripts, but any kind of communication, marketing, all of it.
One of my good friends (who actually ran MTV for years) used to say “Any job I had open, I could hand it to a writer, and they’d figure it out.”