And at a time when special effects dominate the industry, when movies are routinely budgeted over $100 million dollars and when egomaniac directors routinely go over schedule and over budget (that’s you, hack Scorcese), it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker like Eastwood confident and competent enough to make modestly budgeted films ahead of schedule and under budget with an emphasis of story over effects.

So how does Clint Eastwood do it? Well, for starters, he’s been directing for a long time so he has both confidence and experience in his craft. It also helps that he worked in television where the quick production schedules and limited budgets necessitated that a director work quickly and efficiently. The other thing that Eastwood does is his homework. He knows exactly what he wants and needs when he arrives on the set. That way he doesn’t have to waste time figuring things out on the set.

For the next few posts, the Moose will write about some of the various directing techniques that Clint Eastwood uses and how you can use those techniques to better your filmmaking.

The first technique that the Moose would like to talk about is simple enough. Find and trust great material. Of course, this sounds more like common sense than a specific filmmaking technique, but you’d be surprised at how often people ignore this technique. When you’re looking for material to direct, make sure that they story is solid. Any problems that you find in the script when you read it will be there when you shoot it. Make sure the script is sound and all your problems have been worked out before you begin production.

Now here’s where people fall off of the good material bandwagon. When the script is good, leave it alone. When Paul Haggis turned in his first draft for Million Dollar Baby, he expected Eastwood to give him some notes and was prepared to do a rewrite. But Clint Eastwood liked what he read and knew that the story was solid so he started preparing to shoot Haggis’s first draft. In Hollywood, this is the exception, not the rule.

Typically, the standard operating procedure is to rewrite, usually by committee, until you drain all the life out of a story. Oftentimes actors and directors will sign onto a project after reading a great script. The producers and the director take the script through several rewrites (the development process) until the script no longer resembles the story that attracted the director or the actors in the first place. But Clint Eastwood knew that Paul Haggis’s script was solid and had all the story elements that he liked from the source material. Therefore, a rewrite was unnecessary.

Find good material, and then trust your material when you find it.  Simple, but easier said than done.

As you may already know, there is a difference between a movie star and an actor. A good actor is not necessarily a movie star. For example, character actor J. T. Walsh.

And there are plenty of movie stars who can’t act. Case in point:

And once in a blue moon, you will come across that rarest breed, a movie star that can act.

Now if you’re looking to do a small, intimate character study, a larger than life movie star in the lead role might be distracting from a creative or artistic point of view. For those roles, you’re better off casting a good character actor. And for big action extravaganzas you’re probably best off casting a movie star known for action. So what do you do with the movies in between? How do you best use movie stars to your advantage from a creative stand point?

I think Alfred Hitchcock had the right train of thought with regard to this aspect. Hitchcock knew how to use a movie star’s persona to expedite the storytelling process. What exactly do I mean? I’ll explain. Hitchcock made suspense thrillers and in these types of movies pacing is critical. If you were to cast an unknown character actor as the hero, the audience would need a reason to care about this character. You would have to spend time developing the character into one that the audience can sympathize with and root for. But this takes time. And in a movie where time and pacing is of the essence, too many scenes devoted to character development can slow down your thriller and bore your audience. But audiences already have a predisposition to like certain movie stars. By casting a movie star like Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart as the hero, Hitchcock could draw audiences into the story using the star power of his actor and therefore dispense with needless character development scenes. The actor’s persona provided a shorthand that Hitchcock used to his storytelling advantage.

A more contemporary example of this would be the casting of Harrison Ford as The Fugitive. Since audiences already know and like Harrison Ford, there was no need to develop the character of Richard Kimble. The director Andrew Davis could instead focus on the Kimble’s search for the one armed man who killed his wife and create a tense, suspense thriller. While the examples I’ve given for this have both been

The other way Hitchcock used movie stars to his advantage was by using the movie star’s persona to subvert an audience’s expectations and take the story in directions they might not expect. Take for instance the story of a man who might be plotting to kill his wife for the money. Ordinarily a movie like this might be too pedestrian to keep an audience’s attention even as a made-for-television movie. But cast Cary Grant as the potentially murderous husband and you’ll have audiences glued to their seats wondering whether or not he’s going to kill his wife. Suspicion was even nominated for Best Picture and earned a Best Actress Oscar for its female star Joan Fontaine.

Or take the story of a peeping tom who spends most of his time spying on his neighbor from his window. Not exactly a movie most people would see on a Saturday night. But cast Jimmy Stewart as the peeping tom and you have the classic Rear Window. By casting against type, Hitchcock was able to get audiences to watch a much darker movie than they might normally watch.

While the examples I have given have all been thrillers, this creative use of casting could apply to any genre. The casting of Drew Barrymore as the first victim in Scream is one example as is the casting of a fat Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land. As a filmmaker, you need to understand what each movie star brings to the table with their persona and the public’s perception of them. Follow Hitchcock’s example and use your movie star’s image to your best creative advantage.

You see, the blue suited penguins believe that movie stars are essential to a film’s success. That’s why they’re willing to show the money and pay the big bucks for stars. The blue suited penguins believe that these stars can generate an enormous amount of free publicity and help to open a motion picture regardless of its quality.

The problem with this line of thinking is that movie stars do not guarantee a movie doing well on its opening weekend. They can be a factor if cast in the right role in the right story, but they can just as easily make flops as any other actors. Case in point, take Charlie Wilson’s War. Here’s a movie starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, arguably two of the biggest stars in the past fifteen years.

Yet the movie opened to a less than stellar $9.6 million dollars and came in 4th place behind National Treasure 2 – Book of Secrets, I Am Legend and Alvin and the Chipmunks. That’s right. The surefire pairing of two of Hollywood’s biggest stars loses to a movie starring Jason Lee and a trio of animated chipmunks.

Want another example? Take Lions For Lambs. Here’s a movie starring Tom Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. There’s no denying the star power involved on this film. First you have Tom Cruise who is one of the highest grossing actors ever. Then you add ’70s matinee idol Robert Redford and The Devil Wears Prada star Meryl Streep, who also happens to be one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation, and you should have a pure box office bonanza, right?

Perhaps not. Even with all the star power involved on this movie, Lions For Lambs could only open at number 4 at the weekend box office losing out to Bee Movie, American Gangster and Fred Claus. All the movie stars in the world couldn’t help that movie.

People will not go see a movie just for the stars anymore. I’m not sure they ever did. It was always dependent on both the story and the type of movie. Put Sylvester Stallone in Rocky and you have a hit. Put him in Rhinestone and you’ll have a flop on your hands. Cast Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and you’ll be raking in the money. Cast him as a Russian submarine captain in K-19: The Widowmaker and you’ll have both an embarrassment and an expensive box office failure.

But what about the blue suited penguins’s notion that casting stars gets you tons of free publicity that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten? Just keep in mind that nothing is free. You had to pay for the damn movie star, didn’t you? Sure you might get a lot of chances to promote your film with magazine covers and appearances on Leno or Letterman or Craig Ferguson, but you could have bought just as much exposure if not more with the money you used to pay for your movie star. Think about it. Did all the free publicity that came with casting Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart equal the amount of advertising or press you could have bought with her $10 million salary? I think the answer you’ll find is no.

Does that mean that movie stars are useless? After all, what good are movie stars if they can’t guarantee a movie’s opening and the free publicity you get is less than what their salaries would have bought? The answer is no. Movie stars have their place and use. From a financial standpoint, movie stars help to drive the DVD sales and rental markets. A person is more likely to rent or buy the DVD of a movie starring Jet Li even if they never saw the film in its original theatrical release than they are to rent or buy a straight to video film starring someone they’ve never heard of. That’s why faded and fat former action stars like Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme still have healthy careers making straight to video movies. People are more likely to see one of these clunkers starring someone they know over a movie they’ve never heard of starring someone unknown.

Close ups are effective because they focus your attention on something in the scene to let the audience know that this is important. They can work like exclaimation points in writing. But if everything is a close up, then nothing is really emphasized because each shot is of the same importance. All you’re left with is talking heads which is not visually interesting and doesn’t tell the story visually.

Watch any well crafted movie and you’ll see that the director tells a lot of the story in wide and medium shots. The close ups are used for emphasis, whether it’s on a character’s face to show their reaction or thoughts on it’s an insert of some important clue. The more sparingly close ups are used, the more power they have when they’re used.

So why do so many contemporary filmmakers over use close ups? I believe there are two answers that will apply to most cases. The first is that they just don’t know any better. When directing, many new, or bad, filmmakers just want to move the camera. Case in point:

They don’t think about how to tell the story visually with pictures and they don’t know how to break a scene down into what is important and what isn’t important. As a result when there is a lot of dialogue or they don’t know how to move the camera, they use close ups to bridge the moments and fill in the gaps until they can move the camera again. They, in essence, use close ups because they don’t know what else to shoot in order to tell the story.

The second reason why I think many directors today use close ups so heavily is that many feature directors started off in television. Although television is, like film, a visual medium, most television is directed like radio.

Time is of the essence. The blue suited studio penguins insist on more information being crammed in before the next commercial. They don’t let the directors tell the story with the camera. And with television’s quick production schedules, the directors often don’t have the time or budget to properly shoot a scene. Close ups are a quick and cheap way of shooting a scene and getting across information.

But you know better. You know that your job is to shoot the inherent drama of a scene. Not the bare information of the scene. And if you’re not sure whether or not to use a close up, just remember that good directing, that is good visual storytelling, involves telling the story in pictures. So if you were to turn off the sound in your scene, does that close up help you to tell your story? Does the close up help you to make a certain point? If it does, then by all means use it. Otherwise, find a different shot that helps you to tell you story.

Sure, you get a little exposure and a few scripts have been sold as a result but no careers have been launched off any contests except the Nicholl and the Chesterfield. So for the rest of the contests, you’re basically just competing for cash. That being said, the contests with a large cash prize give you poor odds of winning because of the sheer number of entries. And since screenwriting contests are judged based off of subjective criteria, you’re probably better off going to Vegas to try to win money.

That being said, there are a few contests that are worth entering. One of them is the filmmaking festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico known as the Duke City Shootout. Although Albuquerque may be best known as the place where Bugs Bunny should have made a left turn…

…aspiring filmmakers should get acquainted with the city as the Duke City Shootout could become a fertile training ground and launch pad for writer-directors.

Launched in 2000 as the Flicks on 66 Wild West Digital Shootout, the idea of this film production festival was to take an entrants script in one week from the page to the screen. The first festival produced ten 10 minute shorts. The festival changed its name to the DigiFest SouthWest in 2003 and finally to its current name the Duke City Shootout in 2005.

What makes this contest stand out is from other screenwriting contests is that the finalists actually get produced. The way the contest works is filmmakers submit a script for a short film 12 minutes or less. Using the industry standard estimate of 1 page equals 1 minute of screen time, your script should be no more than 12 pages. If your script is over 12 pages, you will get penalized per page over the limit. The deadline to submit your script is May 15th.

Once all the entries have been received, the judges will then pare down the entries to ten finalists who will be given script notes and suggestions for revisions to help rewrite and strengthen their stories. Then the finalists will be given five days to re-write their script. The judges and producers will then select 7 of the 10 final scripts to be produced.

The Duke City Shootout will then fly each of the seven finalists out to Albuquerque where they will each be assigned a producer and creative team to help them film their short. The contest will pay for all costs of equipment rentals and labor and supply each filmmaker with $1500 for location expenses, expendables and other expenses. Filmmakers will then have from the crack of dawn on July 26 to midnight of August 1st to shoot and edit their films. The Gala Premiere for all the films will be on August 2nd.

From watching the finalist films of the past two years, I can tell you that the production value of the Duke City Shootout films can be quite impressive. Some of the films have a little CGI and others have used aerial photography from a small plane or helicopter

While the production value of the films made through the Duke City Shootout are high, the quality of the writing and filmmaking leave a lot to be desired. After watching the films and reading the scripts, I have to say that the bar has been set pretty low. Many of the scripts are one note or just one joke.

I think this is largely because the Duke City Shootout contest is still relatively young and not as well known as other contests that have been around longer like Scriptapalooza. That’s good news for you as it means that you’ll have a better chance of becoming a finalist. None of the finalists that I have read or seen so far actually has a story with any resonance. If you can write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end with even a little bit of resonance, I think you would easily make the finalist stage.

I’m so sure that the Moose is going to write and submit a short script for this contest this year. I will keep you updated on the progress and results from my entry, but I urge all you aspiring writer-directors and filmmakers to write and enter your own script. This year is the first year where all the films will be shot in hi-def. With this contest, you can shoot a short film or calling card on someone else’s dime using toys and other fancy equipment and techniques that might not be available to you on your own. That’s a pretty sweet deal if you think about it.

Keaton’s quote illustrates an important concept in film directing. Substitute drama for tragedy and you have a good rule of thumb to follow when directing your own movie.

Close-ups focus your attention on something. Whether it’s an insert of a knife in the hands of woman contemplating killing her cheating husband or reaction of the priest when he hears someone confess to a murder in confession, a close up used properly can bring out the inherent drama and tension of a scene. By drawing attention to something with a close up, the director places importance on the subject.

Filmmakers can also use close ups to shorten the aesthetic distance between the audience and character. What this means in plain English is that close ups can help the audience connect more intimately with the subject. By focusing on an actor’s face, the director can bring out a character’s thoughts and feelings. This is a valuable tool for use in drama where a character’s thoughts and reaction are central to the story.

Comedy, on the other hand, needs to keep the audience at a distance in order to bring out the humor of the situation. Most comedy lies in the reaction of the characters in the scene to what is happening at the moment. That’s why so many movies pair up a funny character with a straight man. The reaction of the straight man, or the character that stands in for the audience, is often times the source of the humor. Other times, the straight man is used to set up the comic character. That’s why wide shots are better for comedy. It’s funnier to see both the comic and the straight man at the same time. For proof, just watch any TV sitcom whether it’s I Love Lucy, Friends or Perfect Strangers. The actors are almost always filmed in long shots.

Another reason why side shots or long shots are better for comedy is that in comedy, the audience doesn’t want to see what the characters are feeling or thinking. It’s the situation that’s funny. Take, for instance, the classic comic pratfall of slipping on a banana peel. Now filmed in a long shot, you would see the hero walk down the street, step on the banana peel and then fall hard the ground to the amusement of nearby spectators. That’s comedy.

Now, let’s take the same scenario only this time we’ll film it as a drama. The hero walks down the street. A close up on the hero’s face shows that he’s lost in his own thoughts. Cut to an insert of the banana peel to warn the audience of the impending danger. The hero steps on the banana peel and slips, and falls hard to the ground. Cut to a close up of the hero’s face contorted with pain. This scene is not funny. By showing us the hero’s pain, the scene focuses on the character and not the situation. This is the nature of tragedy, or drama.

One of the reasons why so many modern feature film comedies are not funny is because the directors, who often don’t know any better, shoot too much of the scene in close ups. They try to focus too much on what’s funny by shooting it in close up. What they should do instead is pull the camera back and trust in the actors, the script and the audience to laugh at the humor of the scene.

While there are always exceptions to the rule, directors would be wise to heed the words from one of the great directors of cinema. So the next time you’re breaking down a script and getting ready to film a scene, just remember “Tragedy is a close-up; Comedy, a long shot.”

The reason I think this is that most people think that character is a collection of traits. They think, “Napoleon Dynamite, wow, what a great character,” because they see the glasses and nerdy behavior as character.

Guess what? Those are character traits. They’re not character. Actors, when they’re researching a role, often invent elaborate histories to help them develop the character. But that’s not character development, that’s back story. Many writers follow the advice of writing books and writing classes when creating a character by asking questions like, “what does the character look like?” or “what is this character’s greatest fear?” or “what are the flaws of this character?”. But those questions have nothing to do with character.

So what is character then? The dictionary defines character as “the combination of qualities and features that distinguishes one person, group, or thing from another.” So what does that mean? Well, for starters, it rules out looks, at least for writers. Character is not the way one looks or the way one dresses. Why? Because you could give another person Napoleon Dynamite’s hair, glasses and clothes and still distinguish that person from Napoleon Dynamite.

So what makes up character then? It’s not what one likes. Giving your character an obsession over teddy bears or a fear of snakes is not character because many people like teddy bears and are afraid of snakes. So what is character?

Character is what a person says or does in any given situation. That’s it. That’s what distinguishes on person from another. The words they say, actions they take and their reactions to events. That’s all character is.

“But what about the character’s appearance?,” you might ask, or “what about their lifelong dream to become a world figure skating champion?” Forget it. Neither of them is character. The character will look like the actor and whatever cosmetic flourishes the director chooses to bestow on the actor. And how the character pursues their lifelong dream to become a world figure skating champion will define that character. The dream itself is just a dream.

As for actors, they do not need to “become” the character as so many Method actors strive to do. There is no need to walk around the set in character. The actor’s job is to say the lines and communicate the story to the audience. The audience cannot know what an actor is thinking or feeling at any one point. It’s all an illusion. Besides, the emotion of what the actor is feeling is irrelevant in movies. It’s the emotions of the audience that is important. The illusion of character is created by the simple and uninflected direction of actors cut together in shots in the context of a story.

How does that help you as a writer or filmmaker to develop character? It’s simple. It all comes back to story. Your characters will form in the minds of the reader or the audience when they see the people in your story act and react to the events that unfold. The characters that take actions towards achieving their goals will be conceived as strong while the characters that merely react to events will be seen as passive and weak.

Have you ever gotten caught up in a good book and enthralled by one of the characters in it? Then when you see the movie, you ask, “how could they get the character of _____ so wrong?”. The answer is simple. The audience wants to be involved in the story. Thus the more specific you are on character traits, appearances and quirks, the less successful the character is in a movie. Because the more detailed and specific you are on film, the less the viewer can fill in the blanks and create a character in their minds.

Take for instance, the character of Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men. Aside from the European page boy hair cut, there are not a lot of details given about this character.

For the most part, the character is kind of a blank. But his actions and his words, especially the conversation between him and gas station attendant, allow you to form your own ideas about the character in your head. The result is a character that has captured the imagination of the audience. You want proof? Take a look at all the Best Supporting Actor awards that Javier Bardem has swept this year. Bardem was intelligent enough and brave enough to play the role simply, and thus allow the audience to create the character in their minds. Focus on telling a good story and trust in your audience to help you create the characters.

Part of the reason for this is the stories that are being made now. I mean, how many sequels and prequels and remakes and reimaginings and reboots can one take. But there’s another reason for this decline in filmmaking quality and it’s much less obvious. It’s the advent of video and digital filmmaking.

You see, before digital video was around, people learned to make movies by shooting on film. And shooting on film is both expensive and time consuming. Therefore, when directors were learning their craft, they had to plan what they wanted and pre-visualize everything before they shot it. It was too expensive and would take too long to do otherwise. Moving the camera meant changing the set up and could take hours.

Every shot had to be planned out ahead of time and directors were forced to think “what am I saying with this shot” or”what is the meaning of this cut” or even “will this shot cut together with the previous one”. Directors working this way learned how to best tell a story with shots and cuts.

This all changed with the ease and accessibility of video, especially digital video. Unlike film stock, tape is cheap. Shooting video is fast and relatively easy. You can see the way the shot will turn out ahead of time on a video monitor. Moving the camera is easy. All of sudden, pre-visualization is no longer as important. This must all sound like a filmmaker’s dream, but the reality is that this ease is what is killing the quality of movies today.

You see, video and digital filmmaking has become a kind of crutch. Directors no longer need to plan out their shots. They can see everything on a video monitor. If something doesn’t work on the monitor, they can just move the camera easily. As a result, many directors have gotten lazy and have stopped pre-planning their shots. New and aspiring filmmakes who learn their craft on video may never learn to pre-visualize.

Without this pre-planning and pre-visualization, the predominant question that directors ask themselves changes from “what am I saying this shot/cut” to “where can I place the camera to get a cool shot”. Video doesn’t just change the learning curve, it changes what is learned. Filmmakers no longer focus on how to tell a story with pictures. Instead, they learn how to make visual “eye candy” with their shot selection or by moving the camera. Now, it doesn’t matter what the meaning of the cut is as long as the images look good.

This is not to say that every director now has done away with pre-visualization, but the temptation to just move the camera around looking for pretty images and shoot on they fly is too great for many directors to ignore. For many new filmmakers, video has shifted the dynamic of movies from using images to tell a story to using a story to hang pretty images on.

While I believe that video and the digital filmmaking process can be a great tool, to learn on video makes it too easy for aspiring directors to rely on the technology instead of putting in the work to plan out their films. I think it is important for directors to learn how to shoot on film first before they are introduced to the ease and convenience of video. That is why I am saddened to see so many film schools switching over from film to video.

There has been a great debate in the film industry about the future of film. Prominent directors such as George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez have not only embraced digital filmmaking but have also trumpeted it as a replacement for film. Other filmmakers are much more reluctant about replacing film as a medium with digital video. They cite digital video’s lower resolution and dynamic range as well as other aesthetic qualities as reasons not to abandon film as a shooting format. The real importance of shooting on film, however, is not just about the aesthetic of film as many purists would argue, but about the limitations and discipline that film forces upon filmmakers. We can only hope that the next generation of filmmakers realizes the importance of telling stories through images and learns to use advances in digital filmmaking as a tool instead of a crutch as so many filmmakers are doing now.

Anyway, I bring this up because I run into many aspiring filmmakers who often times ask me what film school they attend. In the 1970′s when Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and others emerged from their respective film schools and took the film industry by storm. Now there are many film schools around the country and around the world that offer degrees in cinema. The question is how necessary are these degrees and are these film schools right for you and your career.

The short answer to this question is no. The long answer is maybe. There are just as many prominent filmmakers who have succeeded without going to film school as there are ones who have. Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher and Robert Rodriguez are the most notable examples of filmmakers who have had no formal film school training and Steven Spielberg was twice denied admission to USC. A film degree is just not necessary in this industry and the truth of the matter is that you could probably learn more about filmmaking working on a film shoot for one month than you can from four years of film school. Then why is the long answer maybe?

Let me begin to answer this question by telling you a little about my experience at USC. When I was in high school, I decided late in the game that I wanted to become a filmmaker so I decided to apply to film school. Naturally, living in the South I had no idea what the good film schools were and if I could even get into them. While my grades and academics were good, I had no art background or portfolio to speak of. I had not made any films as a youth nor did my family own a video camera for me to experiment with.

Through my research, I settled on applying to 7 different colleges with a film program. Why 7? Well, first, this was at a time before the internet so researching film schools was a little more difficult than it is now. I basically just looked up all the universities I could find that offered a degree in film that looked good and applied to them. Then, like I said, I didn’t know if my academic credentials would be enough for me to be accepted to a film school.

The schools I applied to were:

USC School Of Cinema-Television (now School of Cinematic Arts)
NYU Tisch School Of The Arts
Boston University
Emerson College
VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Ithaca University
Sycracuse University

I ended up being accepted by all seven schools but I decided to go to USC because it was the top ranked film school in the nation and because they gave me the most money (scholarship, woo hoo!). So I moved to Los Angeles and started my film school education.

Over the next four years, I took every film course that sounded interesting including a big-budget filmmaking course taught by Michael G. Wilson, the producer of the James Bond movies. Film school was an enjoyable experience for me. Then I graduated and started working in the industry. I quickly discovered that there is a film school way of making movies and a real world way of making movies. They were not the same.

In film school, you had to take required classes on film history and film theory. Are these classes useful? Not really if you just want to make movies. These classes are there to justify having a film program at an academic institution by legitimizing movies as a medium worth studying. That being said, they can be useful in helping you find your own directing style by showing you the trials and mistakes of many directors who have come before you.

In the end, I learned a lot more about movies from my first three months working in the industry than I did in four years at the top ranked film school in the country. Still, I find my experience at USC both necessary and instrumental in my development as a filmmaker. How? Because being in film school allowed me the time to explore and find myself and my own identity. Not everyone is ready to jump into a professional setting immediately after graduating from high school. It is better to find yourself, your voice and what is it that you want to say in the sanctuary of something like film school than it is under the scrutiny of the public eye.

To go back to the long answer of is film school right for you, the answer is maybe. If you’re just looking to learn the craft of filmmaking, then no. You’re better off working on sets and learning as you go or attending one of those two or three day filmmaking seminars that focus on usable skills. Or taking the money that you would have used for tuition and shooting your own independent film. But if you’re young and interested in film and you don’t have a lot of experience in life, then maybe film school is a good place for you to find yourself as you learn the craft of filmmaking.

Here are links to the top filmmaking programs in America:

USC School of Cinematic Arts

NYU Tisch School Of The Arts

AFI (American Film Institute)

UCLA (University of California – Los Angeles)