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SearchReality Checks: How Film Schools are Adapting toEntertainment Industry Changes
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film schools,
Summer 2024

Scan the entertainment business press and everywhere you’ll
see the phrase “the great contraction.” The aftermath of COVID
shutdowns, labor strikes, the wind-down of zero-interest-rate
policies, the end of peak TV, changes in the competitive
streaming landscape, the rise of TikTok—all have conspired tomake the ever-perilous path toward a career in feature film andtelevision even more uncertain.
The economic laws of supply and demand, as they pertain to thelabor market, would indicate, then, that film schools must be
feeling an enrollment pinch, but talking to various graduate andundergraduate chairs and professors from across the country,
that’s not the case. The top schools remain competitive, andincoming students—well, they want to direct.
“You poll the students,” says Emerson College associate
professor and chair of the Visual and Media Arts program Shaun
Clarke, “and they’re coming in because they’re watching movies

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and TV shows, and they want to be writers, directors andshowrunners making these movies and telling these stories.”
Prashanth Kamalakanthan—a director, Filmmaker 25 New Faceand assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University
School of the Arts, which reports record enrollment—concurs.
“The COVID years kept people locked up and streaming stuff, so
there’s now a new generation,” he says. “They have seen morefilms, they write on Letterboxd and their knowledge of global
cinema is increasing. They apply into a cinema program at theage of 17 or 18, and they want to make, mostly, TV shows andmovies. Especially as freshmen, they are like, ‘This is what I love.’”
But if students aren’t fretting over the laundry list of obstacles
comprising this article’s lede, faculty are, and amid all this change
they are adjusting curricula to prepare students for the alteredenvironments they’ll encounter come graduation. Says program
director and senior lecturer Sig Libowitz about curriculum
changes made by the Johns Hopkins University Graduate Film &Media Program: “We want to help our students get a good, solid
launch into their careers by providing the strong tools andcraftsmanship that the modern film and media industry is looking
for, such as advanced courses in editing, VR and sound, budget
and scheduling, understanding IP and key entertainment law andcontract issues. [We also want to provide] an honest
understanding and acknowledgment of the changing film industry
landscape in terms of how streaming platforms are impacting thefinancing, festival and distribution models, the opportunities andchallenges that AI and virtual production bring to the table andhow to prepare and present yourself as a ‘professional’ and gain
your first, second and continuing jobs in the industry.”
The most obvious curriculum adjustments across many schools
involve adding courses in new technologies. In recent years,many schools—including Georgia State, Full Sail, USC, andSavannah College of Art and Design—have installed volumes, thegiant LED walls enabling filmmakers to place actors within
immersive, 3D environments. At NYU, two virtual production
stages will open later this year at the Martin Scorsese Virtual
Production Center in Industry City, and the school now offers aseparate one-year MPS degree in virtual production.
In short, classes in virtual production are becoming widespread.
At Johns Hopkins, for example, a first-year intro course,“Foundations of Immersive Storytelling,” gets students“comfortable creating projects utilizing several tools they’ll beusing in more advanced classes, such as Unity, Unreal Engine,
Blendr and 360 Camera techniques,” reports Libowitz.
Emerson’s video wall will go live in the fall, and Clarke says new
faculty members have been hired to specifically teach virtual
production and game design to “get students familiar with basiclevel coding and being able to create within the video gameenvironment.”
The rise in virtual production and changing workflows are forcing
schools to alter traditional production and post-production siloing.
“Technology is advancing at light speed, and the difference
between pre-production and post-production is collapsing,”
writes Jenn Ruff, head of post-production at NYU Tisch School ofthe Arts. “Students need to understand much more aboutthe whole post process before they shoot, so we are trying tohelp them understand all of their technical choices while notlosing sight of artistry. There are a zillion codecs and newcameras, and we try to balance learning as much as possible
about them without getting overwhelmed and thinking that ‘thetechnology is your film.’”
An example of a curriculum reflecting this thinking is, says Ruff,
the school’s post-production finishing class. Taught by colorist
and video artist Natacha Ikoli, the class works in collaboration
with a cinematography class taught by DP Frederick Elmes (BlueVelvet, The Night Of), “so students can understand seamlessly
how their camera choices can be shaped and manipulated inpost.”
AI remains a contentious topic in the entertainment business, withwidespread fears that the technologies will lead to job
elimination, but there’s also a sense among educators thatstudents must be taught how to work with them in order tocompete. The Animation Guild recently co-commissioned a study
drawing on the input of 300 executives and managers anddiscovered that “Three-fourths (75 percent) of survey
respondents indicated GenAI tools, software and/or models had
supported the elimination, reduction or consolidation of jobs intheir business division.” At the same time, however, “mostexecutives and managers indicate GenAI has already led to thecreation of new job titles and roles in their organization.”
Accordingly, new advanced classes at Johns Hopkins include
ones on collaborating with AI, says Libowitz, while at Columbia
University School of the Arts, says film chair and associate
professor Jack Lechner, “We’ve continued to build up theofferings of our Digital Storytelling Lab,” referring to the “nextgeneration media lab” run by filmmaker Lance Weiler. Recently,Weiler and the Digital Storytelling Lab mounted what Lechner
calls “a major masterclass on AI” involving leaders from the field
where both students and faculty members formed teams “andhad to develop movies with AI tools.”
But film school changes don’t just have to do with technology. For
example, as the intimacy coordinator has become an acceptedrole on film sets, schools are adding presentations on thepractice, incorporating them into student productions and, in thecase of UK’s National Film and Television School, offering a parttime, six-month course leading to an NFTS certificate in intimacy
coordination. Aimed at those with “experience in movement
directing and teaching, choreography or directing,” the course
includes instruction on choreographing scenes involving touchand kissing, implementing a closed set, BDSM scenes, working
with VFX and green screens and birth scenes, among others.
Eco, or climate cinema, is a topic studied in many cinema studies
courses, but it’s now appearing in production courses as well.
Says Lechner, “This fall, we’re, for the first time, doing a course incollaboration with the [Columbia] Climate School on climate
storytelling, which [producer] Lydia Dean Pilcher is teaching. It’s aclass for film students, climate students and students from
elsewhere in the university, and it will look at how you can tellstories that address climate change and think about them in waysthat make them meaningful, relevant and entertaining, and notjust medicine that you have to swallow.”
Common across conversations with chairs and professors is an
acknowledgment that, increasingly, media careers these days
require hybrid skills. Says Richard Gladstein, executive director atBrooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, “Ourindustry has hyphenates, you know? People who do multiplethings.” Feirstein is implementing a new curriculum beginning thisfall, with students no longer enrolling into specific tracks, such aswriter, producer or director. “Students are no longer choosing on
their way in,” Gladstein says. “They’re choosing after a year-anda-half if they want to focus on one area or another.” For the first 18
months, students will learn from “more of a common curriculum”
devoted to “the art and craft of cinema. Everyone will take ascreenwriting class, a history of cinema class and a directingclass,” Gladstein says. “And all the while, everyone’s going to be
making movies because [Feirstein] is very hands-on.”“We acknowledge that the industry has expectations for the
future that are more interdisciplinary,” says Emerson’s Clarke.
Accordingly, “students in our programs don’t declareconcentrations or specialization,” says producer Mike S. Ryan,
associate professor at Emerson College. “Students are free toexplore a range of disciplines—not just film but photography, newmedia, installation art and video game design and development—at any point in their time here.”
Ryan and Clarke cite a number of Emerson graduates whose
hybrid working methods have produced early success, such as
the Oscar-winning Daniels. “They took traditional filmmaking
classes and merged [their study] with animation and some of the
new media courses and became After Effects gurus,” notes Ryan.
And Emerson graduates Tyler Taormina and Carson Lund fromOmnes Films, who had Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point and Eephus
in Cannes this year, have built their production company around
its members playing technical and producing roles across eachother’s features.
In Emerson’s Visual and Media Arts Foundations course, says
Ryan, “all the way through is the idea that the producer is astoryteller and needs to understand that their story can beimplemented through various mediums.”
Several of the educators we spoke to were conscious of the work
samples students would take into the marketplace upon
graduating. At NYU, Julia Solomonoff, chair of NYU Tisch’s
Graduate Film Department, cites as a change a new “tighter
writing curriculum that ensures that our students not only leave
the program with strong shorts but with a strong long-format
script (feature film or TV pilot).” Explains Barbara Cigarroa, visiting
professor in screenwriting at NYU Tisch, “By the end of thesemester [in a second year course in feature-length film
development], every student has developed a treatment oroutline for a feature-length film, better preparing them to enter
the third year ready to complete a full script for a feature-length
film or a TV pilot. By the end of the third year, after a full year of

writing workshops, students will have completed at least the firstdraft of their scripts.”
Kamalakanthan highlights a change he calls “a smashingsuccess” at VCU: “The final required core class used to befocused more on the industry—you know, understanding
agencies, case studies of first features. That’s now been spun off
into more of an optional elective offering, and the course has
been redesigned into a senior special projects course. We have aseries of lectures, but it’s really about life skills and understandingthat to do filmmaking as a career, you not only have to be creative
professionally, you have to be creative in the way that you
structure your life. You have to think about time and long-termgoals.”
Accordingly, the class asks students to imagine three documents,
films or research projects that will benefit them one to two years
from now, “when they will likely be in a not-too-different position
from where they are today—with skills and training and trying to
make a career but without the institutional support [of filmschool].”
The resulting projects have run the gamut from the sort ofenriching personal projects that students imagine they won’t beable to make when career pressures dominate to extremely
practical ones. Students have made documentaries about
members of their families and their own personal lives. “Onestudent compared New York, Atlanta and LA over the course of
three weeks,” says Kamalakanthan, “and each week she would
do a presentation on their costs of living and the different typesof productions that [shoot] there.”
Educators say they are also taking in more feedback fromstudents about their education, particularly when it comes to thekinds of guest speakers they’d like to learn from. At Feirstein,Richard Gladstein has brought in colleagues and generational
peers, such as DP Janusz Kamiński and director Gus Van Sant,but he’s now reaching out to filmmakers specifically requested.
“You always want to have Steven Spielberg come in,” says
Gladstein. “He’s undeniable. But when I asked students who theywant me to bring in, they said Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, whogave a series of lectures to our students. And Terence Nance,Kelley Robins [Hicks] and Jamund Washington, who did Random
Acts of Flyness for HBO, came in and were filmmakers inresidence for several months.”
Filmmakers like Nance, says Gladstein, are “a little closer towhere [students] are,” with work that’s “a little more tangible tothem, and it makes [film and TV making] seem slightly moreachievable.” Such a mindset is shared by Solomonoff, who saysthat at NYU, students “now need to graduate in four years.” In thefourth year, she writes, recent grads participate in a mentorshipprogram sharing with current students “‘from the trenches’ info.
We try to bring in ‘creative pods’ like director Raven Jackson,producer Maria Altamirano and DP Jomo Fray to share how theywent from the [short film] Nettles in school to [the feature] All Dirt
Roads Taste of Salt; and director Max Walker-Silverman, DP
Alfonso Herrera [Salcedo] and production designer Juliana
Barreto [Barreto] on going from Chuj Boys of Summer to A Love

Song; and, of course, director Charlotte Wells and editor Blair
McClendon on going from Laps to Aftersun. Other mentors havebeen [directors] Isabel Sandoval, Andrew Ahn, Savanah Leaf,
Laura Terruso and Nikyatu Jusu.”
Concludes Kamalakanthan, “If we’re not just compounding
already existing inequality and selling students a false dream,
essentially scamming them and preying upon their artistic
aspirations, we have to focus on transitioning them out of film
education into the film industry and think about what that means
in a sustainable, accessible way for increasingly diverse student
bodies.” He points out that VCU’s enrollment is diverse, withmany students from small towns in Virginia “who don’t have abackstop of wealth, privilege, access and connections that caninsulate you from some of the harsher economic factors andchanges at play.”It’s no secret that many students at the top-tier film schools dohave this backstop, but these connections are simply not enoughin today’s changing environment. “The majority of students
coming in say they want to be filmmakers,” recaps Ryan, “andthen might take a photography class, or installation art, or they’reinterested in emerging media, virtual production, VR or 360
filmmaking. One of these other strands of filmmaking clicks forthem, and they end up pursuing a completely different trajectory
than expected.”
Whether those left turns replace the desire to make a feature film
or simply become lucrative day jobs, filmmakers need to prepare
for them alongside studying the film canon and writing three-act
screenplays. Adds Ryan, “It’s important for students tounderstand that very few directors in this country, aside from
Spielberg and Scorsese, survive purely from filmmaking. Ridley
Scott, after all, directs films as a hobby because he makes all hismoney from commercials and branded content.”

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