As most of you all know by now, I majored in film. This gave me two valid career options: fast food and retail. (I opted for the latter.)

Really, “What are you going to do with that degree?” is a question that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. The reason I went was because I was hoping it would be an outlet for the stories in my head. See, I’m very visual; when I was writing my NaNo, for example, I had to keep stopping to draw pictures or make storyboards or what-have-you. I still can’t listen to most music without little “mental movies” springing unbidden to my mind.

There was a problem with film school, though; namely, there was sort of a… conflict of interest, I guess.

Professor: “So, what sort of movies do you guys want to make?”
Everyone Else: “Memento” / “Fight Club” / “Some black and white indie art film”.
Me: “THE LION KING!”
*Everyone turns to stare at me*
Me: “…what?”

…on top of that, take a wild guess on what’s cheaper to make on a shoestring college kid budget: “The Lion King”, or “some black and white art film”? Yeah. So as you can see the “outlet” I was hoping for turned into tagging around on everyone else’s art films while I daydreamed that I was making cartoons instead (although the senior film I ultimately worked on was trying to be “Buffy”, so I guess that was a decent compromise.)

Still, I look back on my time at film school rather fondly. I had fun and learned a lot of interesting things. Among them…

TOP TEN THINGS I LEARNED IN FILM SCHOOL:

10. “Apocalypse Now” is the answer to every test question.

Sound design question? Apocalypse Now. Editing question? Apocalypse Now. Directing question? Apocalypse Now. Seriously. Even if it wasn’t the original answer, you can usually convince the professor that it works somehow.

9. Everyone Gets to do Everything.

The professors hated when you did this and tried to lay down rules. “Everyone in your group needs to specialize in something! I don’t want to see you as an extra in your own movie!”

Yeah. Um. Not happening. In the senior film I ultimately worked on I was producer, co-executive producer, location manager, assistant camera/clapslate, boom operator, and yes, an extra. Good times.

8. Yeah, Hitchcock is cliché, but it’s because he’s a genius.

Yep.

(Oh, the shower scene from “Psycho” is your backup Answer-to-Every-Test-Question should “Apocalypse Now” fail for some reason.)

7. What the Difference Between a “Grip” and a “Gaffer” Is.

…but I’ve since forgotten.

6. 95% of foreign movies will inject insanity directly into your brain.

Exceptions are made for Kurosawa (’cause dude, SAMURAI), and Bollywood. Bollywood (aka Indian cinema) is basically big-budget Disney films except live-action instead of animated. And thus awesome.

5. Script Breakdowns Will Destroy You.

“Script Breakdown” is a nice way to word the following: taking a script and going through it line by line and making a note of every character, every prop, every location, every sound and every special effect in the entire movie, and then organizing them into various lists and charts. It will give you nightmares and it will be a good six months before you can watch a movie again without wincing because “uuuugggh that scene would be so expensive and such a pain and augh.”

4. Animated Movies Will Help You Learn2Story.

See, maybe I was on to something with this “Lion King” thing I was talking about earlier. We watched “The ChubbChubbs” in my screenwriting class as an example of setting up a premise and then delivering a solid story. And I have a very distinct memory of some Hollywood professional who had worked on several films coming into our class and showing us clips from “Finding Nemo” as examples for how to make a good story. I don’t remember anything else he said, except for his high praise of “Finding Nemo”.

3. “Don’t Be Afraid to Kill Your Babies”.

…rather less gruesome than it sounds, I promise. My editing teacher said it, and it was to prepare us for a moment that he knew would come in each of our little film-student-lives at some point where we’d have to leave some beautiful scene on the cutting room floor because it didn’t advance the story.

I still mutter this phrase to myself sometimes when working on my fiction writing.

2. Film Professors Say the Darndest Things.

“This must be a leftist VCR”, “Remember: Actors are sheep”, and “Fidel Castro was starting to get on my nerves, so I told him to stop it” come to mind.

and finally…

1. When You Give Your Story to the World, It Isn’t Yours Anymore.

Another thing my editing teacher said. At first, this sort of miffed me. It was my story, afterall, it meant what I wanted it to mean. But I’ve thought about it a lot since then and I’ve come to agree with him. Sure, my story means one thing to me, but to someone else it may mean something else entirely. And you know what… I think I like it that way.

(This may or may not have added fuel to what would become the Open Source Fangirl Fire.)

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Ah, film school. Good times.

Maybe someday, I will get to make my “Lion King”. In the meantime, I daydream and doodle… and ramble on blogs…