It’s difficult to resume what you learn in a year into a couple of paragraph. What film school did is giving me the knowledge of everything. I didn’t chose a program in which I was only specializing in one domain, I took one that gave me knowledge of everything so that I could later on make the choice.

There’s quite a lot to learn about this industry. Even film school can’t teach you everything that you could learn about it, it only give you the basic that you need to get on a set and be able to do what you have to do. I keep on remembering a line that I’ve heard so many times on set. Someone would ask me or another person if we went to film school and the answer would be yes, and the person would then say “Great, now I have to teach you everything all over again.” Now, this isn’t to say that film school doesn’t teach you things the right way, even if I’m sure that some don’t, but it’s that on set everyone does things in a different way and even if they show you their way, you can still apply your film school knowledge to what you’ve learned. It’s the same basic but somewhat different.

So during the year, teachers introduced us to the equipment, set protocols and etc.. It’s quite a lot of learning for the first few months. Classroom after classroom, so when you finally have the chance to go out on set and make your first short film, it’s an amazing moment of joy. But as soon as everything starts you realize how difficult it is, so you rely on the teachers and their knowledge to guide you through it. After all, that’s why you’re there, for the teachers and their knowledge. No one care about the books, nothing in a book is ever giving you the full experience, while someone who went through the process can.

So you finish your first film, you realize that it’s not perfect, generally far from it, but then you learn and you do another one and another one. So at the end from each one you’ve made you learned from your mistakes, because you’ll do some and there isn’t a better place to do them than during film school. The chances of you getting fired are small, unless you really do something really really wrong.

So if you want me to resume what a year of school is, well I can tell you this. It’s mistake after mistakes and sometime a success or too, but then more mistakes, and at the end you start seeing that you do less and less of those and more and more successful things.

It’s how I learned during the year, from my mistakes and from what I was told by the teachers and that’s what I paid for. But then, once it’s over, its a totally different thing. Film school isn’t the film industry, its similar but a lot smaller. Now its time for you to go out in the real world.

picture by tj2904