UT Film, Year 1, Week 1
I love how UT starts the school year. The first day of classes is always on the Wednesday right before Labor Day weekend. So students begin the school year with a three day week, and then because of Labor Day, follow up with a four day week. We don’t have a full five day week until the third week of classes. A real nice, gradual wading into the pool.
As I said before my program consists of 12 students. There are also an additional 7 students in the newly formed MFA screenwriting program. Then there a bunch of students in either the MA or PhD media studies programs. And then there are something like 900 undergrad RTF (radio, television, and film) students. The whole RTF department falls into the College of Communications which sits as a part of the larger 50,000+ student population of UT. So the MFA production program is really a tiny, tiny spec of a bubble within a much larger whole.
And it will feel like a bubble this first year. All of us take the same classes together in the first year. We’re heavily discouraged (maybe even disallowed) from taking any other classes. Things open up in years 2 and 3. So I have three classes (10 hours) with the same 12 people all located in the same building with several in the same room. Groovy.
Actually, the really groovy thing is that our last class ends at 6pm on Thursday and our first class is not until 11 am on Tuesday. They’ve crammed all of the classes in together from Tuesday through Thursday evening, giving us virtually a four day weekend every weekend to work on projects. Very smart.
So in the first semester, we take editing (all AVID this semester), screenwriting for shorts, and our production class. The production class is the class that brings everything together into actual video/film projects. It’s a year long class with the first semester focusing on documentaries. The second semester will focus on narratives. We have to shoot on video the first semester and film in the second.
It’s a pretty smart layout. Docs are a good place to start since they get us out there with a camera in hand without worrying about lights and scripts. Just as the semester comes to and end and we’re ready to edit our footage we’ll have learned enough from our editing class to go at it. All along, we’re writing several shorts to have something ready to shoot for the narrative-focused spring.
So enough with the back story. The first week was great. Really, it’s just great to get started after all of the orientating and talking about what we’re going to be doing. The professors seem cool, but we’ll see about that over the semester. The best part of the week was sitting in the production class and the professor just showing us clip after clip of different docs and talking about them. Good stuff. Over the weekend, we’re supposed to read the screenplay for the Breakfast Club and write our own two-page scene for my screenwriting class. We also have some reading for the editing class. The big task is writing a one page treatment for the documentary that we want to shoot for the production class. I have some ideas, but more on that in subsequent weeks.
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