I’m doing very well with school but I feel I’m not getting anywhere in the process. I mean, the way school is going I’m not going to graduate until I’m around 25 – 26 years of age which is just absurd especially since I’ve been in school already for a year & a half. I may not even finish my online schooling because it’s a bit pricey for the cost per class. I’m also not able to truly associate or really affiliate with anyone through the online program. Online schooling is just not good in that matter since everything is through a message board. You’re also not able to get hands on with anything. I’ve even looked on transferring but the situation is just not presenting itself well.

I’ve talked to a few people and even read some things on if schooling is needed for this industry and some say yes and others say no. It’s a guessing game from where I’m standing.

I’ve even looked around on ways to get noticed or recognized as many have said film festivals, film schools and so forth but that’s nothing new and I didn’t already know. But in order to enter a film festival, I need a film and that takes a lot of money to get a film made and I just don’t have the resources either. I’m really just looking for answers on what do and how I can get my foot through the door but then again, I’m still looking for a door.

I can’t just up & move to California even though I do plan on going out there sometime down-the-line (when? Who knows at this time) but I wouldn’t know where to begin or let alone look, on how to get some kind of acknowledgment or advice. My folks and I are just trying to find some answers for me or a path of some sorts. It’s just becoming frustrating. My folks are questioning on what to do as it’s a dead end on every corner and opportunities are just not coming about.

I hope that maybe you could provide some answers or something.

– Scott
Florida

I think online classes are a great option for many topics, but basic filmmaking isn’t one of them. Drop out and save your money.

Yes: a class that was purely about screenwriting could be taught online, but almost every other part of filmmaking is physical and collaborative. You need to be setting up lights and comparing angles and figuring out why the sound isn’t recording right. An online session might offer a master class with Robert Elswit talking about composition. It would be fascinating. But it wouldn’t be the practical information you need right now as an aspiring filmmaker.

Make short films. Find little movies that are shooting in Florida and work on them for free. Take local classes in the things that interest you.

You’re 22 — you don’t have to have your whole life figured out. But you owe it to yourself to pursue every interesting thing with every bit of energy you have. And if you still find filmmaking is your number one passion, move to a place where they make movies. That’s Los Angeles, New York, and (recently, thanks to tax credits) Louisiana. Get yourself there and get hired on a movie. You’ll learn more your first week as a PA than you have so far in your online classes.

Read what Adam Davis wrote about his experience moving to LA to get started. It’s not easy, but it’s not overwhelming either. Every young actor you’ve seen on TV has moved to Los Angeles, and trust me, many of them aren’t that smart or confident.

Your parents are nervous because they don’t see a clear path ahead for you. My mom was the same way. But once I was here, working 16-hour days on a hundred different things, she could at least see that I’d found something that really engaged me. I was making things, even if I wasn’t making enough money to buy a bed.

It’s okay to struggle. It’s okay to have doubts. But don’t let them paralyze you. You don’t have much, but you have your youth. There are many folks reading this blog in their thirties or forties with a marriage and mortgage who don’t have options you have. Embrace your freedom and explore.

Stanley Fish:

First, find out who the good teachers are. Ask your adviser; poll older students; search the Internet; and consult the teacher-evaluation guides available at most colleges.

Gerarld Graff:

Pay close attention to what others are saying and writing and then summarize their arguments and assumptions in a recognizable way. Work especially on summarizing the views that go most against your own.

Carol Berkin:

Do ask questions if you don’t understand the professor’s point. Do not, however, ask any of the following: “Will this be on the test?” “Does grammar count?” “Do we have to read the whole chapter?” “Can I turn in my paper late?”

I would add:

• Each semester, pick one class you worry might be too hard for you, and one that’s easy but engaging.

• Never choose a class just because your friend(s) will be taking it. Each course is a chance to expand your social circle.

• Schedule yourself a block of library time for reading/studying, just like it’s a class.

• If you can’t find courses that interest you, take a semester off and re-evaluate.

• Alternate with water.

What would your college advice be?

Darla Horn, 26, acknowledges she didn’t give much thought to the cost of college when she enrolled at State University of New York in Purchase. [...] Because she didn’t qualify for financial aid, she took out student loans, graduating in 2005 with a double major in journalism and anthropology and more than $80,000 in debt.

That’s way too much debt for an anthro-journalist. But is it too much for an engineer? Is it too much for an actuary?

When I was buying a house, the rule of thumb was that you could afford a home three to four times your annual income. It feels like there should be an equivalent rule of thumb for how much you can spend on your education versus average salary of your studied profession. Or, hell, a web calculator.

In a few minutes of Googling, the closest I could find was this:

Don’t take out more student loans than what you expect to make in the first year. This rule of thumb puts a reasonable upper limit on how much in student loans you should take out, which is a good thing, but doesn’t paint the whole picture.

There are some jobs (like screenwriting) in which starting salary is almost impossible to predict, and others (like law) in which salary goes up quickly based on experience. But rules of thumb are helpful because they simplify things, and this one seems a good start.

By this measure, an actuary could take out about $50,000 in loans, while an electrical engineer could feel okay taking on $55,000 in debt. Darla, meanwhile, should have capped her loans at $33,000. (All salary estimates from PayScale.)

What often gets lost in these discussions is that relatively few students end up paying full freight. For four-year, private American universities, the average tuition discount rate for fall 2007 was 39.1%. The price on the sticker isn’t necessarily the price you pay.

But if you’re looking to study a low-paying field, do Future You a favor by being honest about the cost.

Sure: it’s easy to pick numbers that show how a plumber who saves diligently will out-earn an egghead saddled with student debt. (How did plumbers become the Everyman, anyway? In the U.S., there are more lawyers than plumbers.)

The second half of the article raises a more important point: before you can say whether a college education is “worth it,” you need to measure what is actually learned.

Maybe it’s because I went to Drake, which has a big actuarial science program, but I’m a big fan of testing for competency in fields that lend themselves to quantitative measurement. If a college graduates accountants, it should be accountable for what they know, not just to employers but to everyone who helps subsidize that education.

Hough points to the College Board’s AP exams as a template to consider. They’re hardly perfect. Anyone who took AP US History will remember that it’s far too easy to study for the test and then forget everything you learned.

But testing does prove what you can learn. For many of today’s jobs, one’s knowledge is less important than the ability to pick things up quickly. I don’t know that you’ll ever be able to place a value on a film degree, much less measure what was learned. But if you test for adaptability across a range of disciplines — writing, technology, presentation skills, creative problem-solving — I think a film school grad would measure up well.

Synthian Sharp, one of the nicest folks I met during the strike, took it upon himself to tape my Q&A in Rancho Mirage. He now has it online at Vimeo, where you can also download a much beefier 934MB version.

This talk was very much geared towards a general audience. While there were some film students, most of the crowd was over fifty. We spoke more about the career than the craft of screenwriting.

I showed five clips. Weirdly, I didn’t pick one from The Nines, but I did show one scene from Scott Frank’s Minority Report that had my fingerprints on it.

At 112 minutes, it’s quite a time commitment. If you’re skipping around in the video, here’s the rough order of what I talk about:

• How I got started
• Go
• DC
• Charlie’s Angels
• Minority Report
• Big Fish
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• God (the short film on The Nines DVD)
• The Nines
• Audience questions

Thanks to The Friends of the Rancho Mirage Public Library, Palm Springs International Film Society, and moderator Deborah Dearth. And of course Synthian for putting this up.

I couldn’t.

I asked again today on Twitter, and those two were by far the most common answers.

Sure, some qualifiers are in order. By “foreign language,” I’m using shorthand for “language not spoken natively in the home.” If you’re born in Rhode Island, but your parents are Italian, I would hope they’re speaking Italian in the home; the best way to learn a language is from your family. So “foreign language” in this case would mean the third language after English and Italian.

And there are other special circumstances. For example, if you move to Sweden, you should really learn Swedish. If you or a family member are deaf, ASL would be the choice. If you’re from a country with two official languages (e.g. Canada), that second language may be the default.

But beyond what you pick up from your family or neighbors, your first non-English language should be Spanish or Mandarin.

My logic and biases

I was born in the U.S. I’m fluent in English. I’m competent in Spanish, less so in French. I can ask directions in German, Portuguese, Japanese and Mandarin, with declining likelihood of being able to understand the answer given. I live at the edge of Koreatown, and while I can read Hangul well enough to decipher transliterated signs, I don’t speak the language at all.

I learned Spanish starting in second grade, part of a bilingual project in my elementary school in Colorado. Obviously, part of the reason I admire the language is that it’s the first one I learned.

There is a misperception that one “needs” to speak Spanish in Southern California. In 17 years here, I can count on one hand the number of times in which my Spanish was actually necessary. But it’s certainly useful.

I think people should speak several languages, not only for the opportunities it presents for international business and travel, but the broader global and literary perspective it provides. You’re going to learn one language first. Pick wisely.

My criteria were, roughly:

1. Number of people who speak it worldwide
2. Usefulness in daily life
3. Usefulness in international business or travel
4. Availability of media in that language
5. Applicability to future language learning
6. Economic power of native speakers

The contenders

In the list of top languages spoken worldwide, there are several worth serious consideration.

Hindi (#3) and Arabic (#5) both have vast numbers on their side. With satellite, access to media in both languages has increased worldwide. They are clearly useful languages for business and travel. But I can’t make a compelling case for learning either of these before Spanish or Mandarin. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise; my American bias may be coming through.

Portuguese (#6), Russian (#8), Japanese (#9) are each spoken mostly in their respective economically-powerful countries, and not many other places. They’re great languages to know if you intend to do business in those countries, but it’s hard to argue that they should be general-case choices.

German (#10) shares roots with English, though that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to learn. English is widely taught in Germany, which makes learning German less essential for native English speakers than it might be otherwise.

French (#12) has a tremendous amount of literature and Western Civilization in its favor. While the total number of French speakers isn’t that high, there is fairly wide distribution given the language’s role in international diplomacy. As a romance language, it shares a lot of structure with Spanish. I found it quick to learn given what I already knew.

I’m omitting Cantonese just based on numbers. More people speak all of the languages listed above. Learning Mandarin would put an English speaker on a path towards learning Cantonese later. I’m guessing familiarity with a tonal language like Mandarin could be a help for other Asian languages in general.

I’m also omitting Esperanto and Klingon, even though each has a special place in my heart.

The case for Mandarin or Spanish

Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in the world,¹ and China’s influence will only grow in the years ahead. China is an active investor worldwide, including Africa and South America, yet distribution of Mandarin speakers is relatively sparse outside of Asia. Fluency in English and Mandarin could be a tremendous asset.

Cons for Mandarin: It’s a more challenging language for native English speakers. Learning its rhythms, tones and phonemes — and writing system — would take a lot of work. But getting that practice early in life would be a boon. Currently, there are limited outlets for Mandarin media in the U.S. One’s ability to actively use the language may be limited based on location.

Spanish is the fourth most common language after English and Hindi. It’s tremendously useful in the Western hemisphere — spoken in almost all of Central and South America with the notable exception of Brazil. ² In the U.S., one finds an abundance of both native speakers and Spanish-language media outlets. You can use Spanish on a daily basis without ever leaving the country.

While it has a daunting number of conjugations, Spanish is grammatically straightforward and remarkably consistent with pronunciation and sound rules, which makes it well-suited for school-based study. With its Latin roots, it has tremendous vocabulary overlap with English and most European languages. Learning Spanish early may increase overall English vocabulary as well.³

Cons for Spanish: While the number of Spanish speakers will probably continue to grow, there is no reason to anticipate its reach expanding beyond its current borders. It’s certainly more useful in the U.S. than in the U.K. or Australia. Fluency in Spanish is so common in the U.S. that it’s not a particularly unique or marketable asset.

Should we bother teaching other languages?

In high school, yes. In college, absolutely. You need to reward motivated students who want to learn languages. But I’d argue that in grade school and junior high, we would serve students better by offering them either Spanish or Mandarin. That’s it.

We clearly have the raw capital (i.e. native speakers) to teach Spanish. I’m not sure we have the capacity for Mandarin.

So have at it. Can you make a compelling case for something other than Spanish or Mandarin as a first foreign language for a native English speaker?

1. The exact numbers vary based on what degree you differentiate native languages from secondary languages, and how much you assume dialects are mutually intelligible. Regardless, the big four stay on top.
2. A competent Spanish speaker will find Portuguese easy to navigate, however.
3. Like French, Spanish has many recognizable cognates with English. Dormir :: dormitory, blanco :: blanch. This doesn’t mean the words came from Spanish, but rather than the words reveal common roots, which is so very helpful come SAT time.

. . .

The traditional function of a graduation speaker is to congratulate you on your accomplishment and challenge you to do your best work in the years ahead. So let me do that. Congratulations, you’re done! Now, go out and do your best work in the years ahead!

Now that that’s done, I want to talk for a few minutes about what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into. I mean, a film degree. Now? In this economy? A lot of you have friends and family in the audience, and I know they’re really happy for you. But secretly, they’re thinking, Jesus.

So what I’m going to say is as much for them as it is for you.

We call this “film school,” but really, that’s only for lack of a better term. You don’t really shoot much film. You don’t dip it in chemicals. You rarely touch it. Rather, what you do in a school like this is learn how to tell stories with words, pictures and sound.

And quite luckily, that’s what the world needs. Two examples.

A friend of mine writes for a major newspaper. And when she was done covering the presidential election, her bosses handed her a videocamera and told her that every piece she delivered now had to include a video component for the website. She needed to be able to shoot it, edit it and deliver it.

Another friend writes for a major magazine. In addition to her story assignments, she’s now required to come up with web features, like little Flash slideshows that can be easily monetized. She also finds herself suddenly on-camera, hosting arrivals at movie premieres, and dealing with all the requisite technical stuff.

There’s not a word for the kind of school that teaches you how to do all this. But the word that’s missing is probably a lot like film school. They send you out of here not to be a specialist, a cardiothoracic surgeon, but rather to be a generalist, a media MacGuyver.

You may think you’re going to be a screenwriter, a director or an editor, but the odds are you’ll be all of those things on different projects at different times.

The one thing you won’t be is an amateur. I want you to banish that word, because you need to treat everything you do from the moment you walk out the door as a professional. This is now your job.

That means doing your best work at all times, even when it doesn’t seem to matter. You may feel like you’re not getting graded. You are. It’s just that no one is telling you what score you got.

And let’s talk about your classmates. You probably have some good friends and some people you kind of hope to never see again. While you were in the program here, you had to rely on them. Your professors put you in teams. You got along, you fought, whatever. That doesn’t stop. No one makes a movie by himself. So if by next weekend, you’re not reading one of their scripts, or helping on something they’re shooting, something’s wrong. Trust me that five years from now, the most successful person in this class will be the one who worked the hardest for other people.

My last piece of advice is probably the one most likely to induce insomnia. Every night when you go to bed, ask yourself: What did you do today to get closer to your goals? That’s a hard question to ask. Feel free to beat yourself up, because no one else will anymore. That’s the best and worst thing about graduating — it’s the end of the systematic evaluation of your progress.

You need to stop wondering what you’re going to do, and focus on what you’re going to do next. Starting now. Congratulations, and good luck.

Also, feel free to hype it in this thread.

We were able to do it to a small degree with the trailer competition, but I’d ultimately love for an editor to load in all of the assets and go crazy. ¹

This spring, we’re going to do a test run. In USC’s Advanced Editing class, students will get every frame of dailies for The Nines on their Avids, so they can work through the process of making a real feature with the real footage. Editor Doug Crise and I will visit to help explain some of our choices, but it will be up to the student editors to figure out what movie they want to make and how.

Given its relationship with filmmakers, USC’s School of Cinematic Arts has done this with many features over the years. But my hope is to find a way to make it possible without the infrastructure of a film school, so that any aspiring editor could get her hands on the real footage. There are legal and technical obstacles, to be sure, but I’m looking forward to seeing how this dry run goes.

1. Yes, an ambitious cutter could rip apart the footage from the DVD — that’s how most parody trailers are made — but it’s not the same as having the real footage. It’s like rewriting a sentence with only ten words and two pieces of punctuation.

I’ve also made the mistake of allowing someone unfamiliar with screenwriting to read a script because they asked me to. You end up explaining everything to death and they still don’t get it which can feed your rampant first-draft-phase insecurity. Was there a strategy you followed back in the day to get the best feedback or did it just happen organically?

I looked but didn’t see anything on the site to help with this. May be helpful to myself and others.

- Matt

The screenplay format is so unlike traditional fiction that it’s hard for newcomers to offer much useful feedback. They often can’t distinguish between the strange experience of reading a movie on paper and the story they just read. You may feel a social obligation to let non-screenwriting friends read your work, but don’t plan your rewrite based on their reactions.

With friends and colleagues who are familiar with screenplays — by which I mean they’ve read at least a dozen, and can talk about them comfortably — you may still need to pick carefully. Certain people and certain genres just don’t mix.

A thoughtful reader, though, can often offer constructive feedback even when it’s not her type of movie.

Back when I was in the Stark Program, we all read each other’s scripts. Al Gough and Miles Millar made their first sale with a script about a cop and an orangutan — a very high-concept comedy. That’s not in my wheelhouse, but I went through two or three drafts with them, offering very specific notes about trims and clarifications. They did the same for me on my overwritten romantic tragedy. Regardless of the genre, a good reader can help a writer see problems and find solutions. More than anything, you want a second smart brain to bounce ideas off of. That’s why you ask people to read your work-in-progress.

And for the praise. You want people to tell you you’re great.

Another thing to keep in mind: Don’t burn out your readers. Unless they actively ask to read the next draft, give them a break. You may even want to keep one or two reader friends “fresh” for the inevitable rewrite.

Between you and me, I’m sick with jealousy for the students who get the new building. Not only is it finally big enough, but it manages to capture the feeling of a studio lot, with all the California Mediterranean details and great attention to the hidden infrastructure — physical and digital.

They have two live webcams documenting the construction, which you can visit here.