Film School in CA

calrule
Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:58:21 +0000

One of my friends is going to be a film major and he got into USC’s film program. Chapman was his second choice, but he said USC is the best in the country in terms of technology and teachers.
There are towers upon towers of hard drives, several rooms full of nothing but AVID editing stations and ProTools stations, two large soundstages, and several recording rooms with mixing boards. Additionally, the classroom that all the sound classes are taught in is itself a theater with a giatn mixing board, and is equipped with 10.2 surround sound. It is taught by Tom Holman, the man who invented THX and 5.1 surround sound (yes, you read that correctly), and who is now in the process of patenting 10.2 surround sound and making it available to the general public. USC has not only the best digital cameras around, but it also has 16mm and 35mm film (which is incredibly super-expensive) for use in more advanced films. Plus the Zemeckis digital arts facility. Otherwise, the school is pretty small…but I don’t think the film people mind.

A pretty simple statistic (that he likes to cite very, very often): not a year has passed since 1973 that a USC Cinema alumnus has not been nominated for an Academy Award.
Although, it doesn’t really take a film school education to be a successful filmmaker. Kubrick never went to film school and Spielberg got rejected from USC Cinema twice. Having said that, I think USC teaches you the established rules and conventions before going out and breaking them. It’s a matter of personal preference.
Additionally, the industry connections you can build at USC, plus the clout that USC has within the film industry definitely boost your chances of success once you graduate from that prestigious a film school. In that sense, USC is a name like Stanford or Harvard specifically if film is the industry you wish to enter.