Applying to Film School: New York University (NYU)

(NOTE: These requirements are based on my application for Fall 2006. They may have changed.)

Program: Tisch School of the Arts: Kanbar Institute of Film and Television (Graduate: MFA)

Website: http://filmtv.tisch.nyu.edu/page/home.html
Application Deadline: December 1st

Components (for Fall 2006):

• Online Application
• Transcripts (All colleges)
• Recommendations (Only 2)
• Statement of Purpose
• Feature-Length Narrative Film Concept
• A Treatment for a Silent Short
• 2 Page Scene
• Portfolio: Video Sample

My Application:

From the application materials, it’s easy to see that NYU puts a tremendous amount of weight on experience.  They don’t care about GRE scores, and they only want two recommendations.  It’s all about your portfolio and the writing assignments.

As a theatre person, I found writing a short silent film treatment extremely challenging.  For starters, at the time I had very little experience with short works — most of my experience has been full length.  I had even less experience telling a story silently.  Theatre starts with the text.  It’s not that I don’t think visually, but the visuals are seeded in the text.  It was difficult to quickly train my mind to think differently for a writing assignment.  I was never happy with my final treatment.

By this point, I had already completed three other applications, so the rest of the application was fairly routine.

My Take:

I received a letter from NYU telling me that although I made the final third, I got cut before the interview round.  All of the other schools I have written about, I researched after I was admitted.  Since NYU rejected me, all I have to offer is what I already knew.

The school is obviously one of the top name film schools.  It has produced filmmaking geniuses like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, M. Night, and Ang Lee.   Spike Lee currently serves as Artistic Director of the program.

An actor friend of mine told me that whenever he acted for NYU film students, they seemed to really know what they were doing (as compared to students from the other big New York school).  I don’t know if that’s because NYU was doing a great job of teaching them, or NYU was just getting the right people.  In general, I’ve heard that NYU looks for more experience in their students making them more like AFI or UT than USC, UCLA, or Columbia.  This is somewhat evidenced in the application requirements.   Therefore, they also have a higher average student age (late 20s as opposed to mid 20s).

NYU is located in New York, America’s second film capital and the capital of the South Asian arts movement.  I visited the campus a few years ago, and it basically felt like New York.  Unlike Columbia, the school does not have an enclosed campus so it just looks and feels just like another Manhattan neighborhood.

On the negative front, a number of people have told me that NYU is an extremely cut throat environment.  Students are extremely competitive and many are unhappy.  I don’t know if there is any truth to that criticism.  Of course, just living in Manhattan brings its own additional stresses.  Added to cost of living and filmmaking in Manhattan, NYU has the highest tuition of all of the schools that I considered.

Although, I didn’t make the interview round, NYU’s interviews are famed.  They are supposed to be extremely challenging and supposedly students are asked to storyboard or break down scenes on the spot.  I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t called in for an interview because it would have been fun.

This may just me consoling myself, but it’s somewhat of a blessing that they rejected me.  I would have been so star struck by the alumni list, that I would have had a hard time making a rational decision about the school.  And if I would have gone there, I have no idea how I would have managed to keep my sanity while I tried to pay for school.

A word about famous alumni: The big three (NYU, USC, and UCLA) win the alumni battle hands down.  It’s no contest.  Just remember, though, film schools are a relatively new phenomena.  Of course, all the older famous people went to NYU, USC, and UCLA.  They were the only games around.  Also, older alumni say very little about the film schools today.  So when considering alumni as a measuring stick, I think that it’s also important to see what more recent graduates are doing.

~ by soham on December 8, 2006.