Applying to Film School

One of my goals when I started this blog was to help others who might be thinking about going to film school. Unfortunately, unlike other graduate programs there’s very little information out there. When I was trying to make up my mind I scoured everything from the school sites, to blogs, to forums, to wikipedia, and still found very little useful information. So I want to capture my thought process and hopefully it will help people out.

I began the process looking for rankings of the schools, but I soon learned that any rankings I found were a joke — just some guy’s rant. We’re talking about art here. Rankings are meaningless because it’s a very individual decision. The schools I choose have a lot to do with my interest in independent, traditional narrative films. If you’re into experimental films, video art, or docs, your list may be quite different.

A good starting point is the Film School Confidential website. They have a great list of various schools here. You can also read the book. I glanced at it at a store, but it’s very dated.

One of the toughest things about the application process is that it’s extremely subjective. It’s not like law school where you can take a look at your GPA and LSAT score and at least have some idea of schools you shouldn’t bother applying to and schools that you would have no trouble getting into. I could easily see myself getting in everywhere or getting in nowhere. So you have to apply to a lot of schools.

So here’s what I did.

First I looked at the glory schools:

• University of Southern California (USC)
• New York University (NYU)
• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• Columbia University
• American Film Institute (AFI)

In America, the film industry is concentrated in Los Angeles and New York. So it shouldn’t be surprising that all of these schools are located in one of these cities. I call these the “glory schools” because if you tell someone that you go to one of them, they go “wow” without really knowing that much about film school. You could be the dumbest guy at Harvard Business School, but to everyone else, you’re at Harvard Business School. Same thing here. USC, NYU, and UCLA are the big three. They have the oldest, most reputed, most glorified programs. Columbia’s program has a decent reputation, but it probably wouldn’t make the “glory” list if it wasn’t in New York and wan’t an Ivy Leuge School. Most people have not heard of AFI, but it’s a very well reputed program amongst people who know film schools. It also has “film” in the title, so it must be good, right?

Of the glory schools, I decided to apply to all of them except AFI. I was looking forward to being back in a university environment, where I would encounter all kinds of people and be exposed to new ideas. AFI is a conservatory, meaning all they teach is film, so it was out.

The University of Texas at Austin was pretty much an automatic for me. I already knew it had a great program, was extremely affordable, and was close to home. As I started reading more about film schools though, I soon discovered that it’s probably the best reputed school outside of LA or New York.

So that had my total up to five schools. As an undergrad, UT was my safety. However as I researched the film program, I learned that they only accept 12 people. In fact, UT has a lower acceptance rate than both Columbia and USC. I decided I needed to pick one more school. So I went back to the list.

CalArts and Chapman University are two other LA schools that get a decent amount of attention. CalArts is often referred to as the “Disney” school because they have a very strong animation program. For being an LA school, they have very few famous live action alumni directors, so I crossed it off. I could be completely wrong, but Chapman seemed like a school that was just capitalizing on the LA runoff, so I also eliminated it.

Next I started looking at Florida State University (FSU). It’s been getting a lot of publicity as a strong up and coming film school. At this point, I decided that it didn’t really make any sense for me to move far away from home unless I was going closer to one of the film capitals. So I eliminated FSU and other contenders from San Francisco, Chicago, and everywhere else. I was left with Temple (in Philadelphia) and Boston University. Temple seemed to be a little more known, but it’s strength was more in experimental films than traditional narrative films. Boston’s unique selling point was that it was only a two year program instead of three — a huge savings in time and money. It also had a high enough acceptance rate, that I felt it made a good safety. Boston is also a gr

So here’s where I applied:

• University of Southern California (USC)
• New York University (NYU)
• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• Columbia University
• University of Texas at Austin (UT)
• Boston University

In subsequent posts, I’ll go through the application process for each of these schools.

~ by soham on September 23, 2006.