High-Tech at a Small School

You’re about to graduate from high school, and you want a career in video production. What do you do? If you choose the academic route, you could go to a high-profile film school, such as NYU, UCLA or USC, with the hope of standing out from the crowd. That’s assuming you’ll be accepted and can afford the tuition.
Alternatively, you could go to a traditional college or university and take whatever production-oriented courses you can find there. With this second option, you could be a big fish in a small pond (with fewer students in your major), but you wouldn’t receive the same kind of intensive technical training that’s available at a film school.
Fortunately, there’s a third option. It’s a new bred of smaller, more specialized film schools that stress video production as well as film production. These schools offer a highly technical, yet supportive environment that’s often lacking at a large urban university.
One of the rising stars among the smaller film schools is the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it’s part of the state-supported University of North Carolina system. The four-year program currently has 235 undergraduate students, with another 10 students enrolled for a graduate degree in film music composition.
Video Apprentices
Even though filmmaking is an integral part of the school’s name, there’s a strong emphasis on video. “I would say that 70 to 80 percent of our productions are now on digital video, and only about 20 to 30 percent are on film,” says Dale Pollock, dean of the School of Filmmaking. “The first two years, we use only video, except for a documentary they shoot on film in the second year. In the third year, they work only on film. And in the fourth year, we now give them a choice of film, video or HD.”
Part for the reason for the lopsided video/film mix is simple economics-film stock and film processing are expensive-but another reason is the potential jobs. Today’s job market includes a growing number of production opportunities in independent films (often shot on video), high-definition cable networks and reality TV shows. Video is no longer the ugly step-sister in Hollywood, but an equal partner even on the most expensive productions. There are many more video opportunities than were previously available, but also much more to learn.
“We’re very production oriented,” says Pollock. “We train directors, producers, cinematographers, editors and sound designers. We do all our own sound effects and edit them with our film music recording stage. And we have the only undergraduate film production design program in the country. We train a mix between what you would call above the line and below the line with all the key crafts. Our students leave with a lot of practical technical knowledge that helps them get jobs.”
What’s the department’s track record for steering the students into relevant jobs? Because the school was established in 1993 and has had graduating seniors for only seven years, “we can track our alumni fairly successfully,” says Pollock. “Eighty percent of our alumni are working in some aspect of production, whether it’s television, film, the Internet, advertising agencies, TV commercials or music videos.” Compared with a typical liberal arts major-such as an English, history or philosophy major-those numbers are impressive. “I think about all these film schools churning out graduates,” says Pollock. “It’s like anything else-some are going to make it, and some aren’t.”
As part of the state-supported university system, there have been budget cuts despite an increase in the tuition. Pollock says he would like to expand more into 24p and HD video. “I’m waiting, quite frankly, for the technology costs to come down a little bit,” he explains. “For us, it’s a major investment. We end up buying 7 to 10 cameras at a time, so it’s very frustrating when I spend a lot of money, and then 18 months later, the price is a third of what it was.” The challenge is to find the right balance. “If you don’t keep current, students will find the schools that do. It’s very competitive in terms of who has the best equipment and who has the best instructors.”
Fortunately, low-cost high-quality cameras and computers have made it much easier to have the tools available for everyone. “What’s clearly different is that students can now own their own equipment,” says Pollock. “That was impossible a few years ago.” In previous years, there were fights among the students over the limited number of edit stations. “We now require all our entering freshmen to buy a PowerBook,” he explains. “We’re an Apple certified school and an Apple certified sales and repair facility, so we can service all our students’ computers. Every student has to buy a computer, and we put Final Cut Pro, Movie Magic Budgeting, Movie Magic Scheduling and Final Draft on each one.”
Providing Final Cut Pro to every student has had a dramatic effect. “Not only has it reduced the tension levels at the school, the editing has greatly improved,” says Pollock. “It had a greater creative impact than I anticipated.” Students can try different edits and compare them simultaneously on a split screen-without having to race against the clock.
A Foot in Both Worlds
How does the instruction differ between video and film? Arledge Armenaki teaches cinematography at the school as a filmmaker-in-residence. He says there are many principles that overlap between video and film, including aspects of framing, basic lighting, how to tell a story and how to place the camera. “One difference the students learn about is the reflective lighting latitude that film and video can embrace,” says Armenaki. “Another is the gamma range.” He points out that some of the newer video cameras have color-matrix and gamma settings that make their recordings more film-like.
“We all talk about the equipment, but as a filmmaker, if you learn some of the essentials of how to tell a good story, any imaging device can be used,” he explains. “It’s the training-not just the technical training, but the aesthetic training-of learning how to visualize, take the words from the page, and create the images that best reflect the strengths of the story.”
Like the other instructors at the school, Armenaki continues to work professionally. “It’s very important for the faculty to maintain professional credits and to be pursuing outside projects, or we won’t have the ability to keep up with the technology,” he explains. “If we’re not growing and learning as the technology is growing and learning, it’s difficult to teach it and pass along the knowledge base.” The 25 members of the faculty represent a diverse group of directors, writers, producers, editors, cinematographers, music composers and production designers. According to the school’s Web site (www.ncarts.edu/ncsaprod/filmmaking/), they have won or have been nominated for Academy, Emmy, Cannes Film Festival, Writers Guild of America and Cable ACE awards.
While the School of Filmmaking can’t compete with the big film schools in every area, it does offer some unusual benefits. “We have a unique program with music composition,” says Armenaki. “We have graduate-level composers who work closely with our third and fourth year students, and sometimes they work on second year productions. All of our fourth year projects have an original music score, which is unique to a film school.” The school has a digital music scoring stage and a separate Foley stage, which adds audio elements you won’t find in student projects from other film schools.
The School of Filmmaking is also home to the second largest non-commercial film archives in the world (second only to the Library of Congress). The extensive collection includes 25,000 original feature films on 35mm; 1,500 live action and animated short films, documentaries and newsreels on 35mm and 16mm; 8,000 previews of coming attractions on 35mm; and 5,000 videocassettes, laserdiscs and DVDs. The core of the archives is the Raymond J. Regis Collection, which is one of the largest privately held collections of Technicolor films in the world. “We have Star Wars in 70mm-one of only 12 prints in existence,” says Armenaki. “And we have one of the best quality prints of Citizen Kane.”
Hands-On Experience
During their freshman and sophomore years, the students use mostly small-format video cameras. “In our first year, we have approximately 70 students,” says Armenaki. “They use a JVC GYDV500U Mini-DV camera, and they do a number of exercises and a final five-minute piece on a fully equipped sound stage with a set. That’s their tour-de-force for their freshman year, and it’s part of the jury process where they’re critiqued before moving onto the second year. In the second year, anyone who would like to can shoot a gorilla piece-a two-to-three day shoot where they go out and work in the field with a very small crew to a tell a story. There they use a Panasonic AJD215P DVC Pro camera.” They use the AJD215P again in the spring when they do a ten-minute narrative piece. “We also have some commercial video classes and documentary classes that use the AJD215P and DV500U,” Armenaki explains. “The directors have some class exercises that use the little Sony DCR-TRV11 HandyCam. Those are used for basic in-class directing exercises and occasionally for some of the first-year exercises.”
The students are also exposed to technical tests that show the imaging capabilities of the different cameras. Armenaki often brings in test charts and performs lighting demos. “I’m in the midst of doing a test with Panasonic’s AG-DVX100AE, the 25p PAL camera, to see what its range is and whether it will meet the capabilities of a fulfillment house during a professional production. Those kinds of outside-of-class projects are shared liberally with students who are interested.”
Because the School of Filmmaking is a fine arts school, the curriculum is different from a traditional university. “Here you generally have two thirds of your curriculum in your fine arts and one third in general studies, where at a university with a film program, it’s generally the opposite,” explains Armenaki. “At a university, you usually have to get through a couple of years of your general studies before you can get into your major. Here you’re shooting your own projects in the first year. And you crew in a tiered system on upper level projects throughout the entire curriculum.”
At the end of each year, every student must go through a jury process in which faculty members assess the student’s progress. “At the end of the first year, it’s basically whether your grades are in position and whether you’re doing work of artistic merit,” says Armenaki. “Then in your second year, the entire faculty looks at the students who are moving on, because at that point, you’re going into your discipline.”
Even though the school has been placing its graduating seniors into the job market for only seven years, it has already begun to make its mark. David Gordon Green was just 24 when he completed his first feature, George Washington. Widely praised when it was released in 2000 through Sony Classics, it’s currently available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. Both Green and his cinematographer Tim Orr are graduates of the School of Filmmaking. Undertow, Green’s latest film, was produced by Terence Malick (the director of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line), and his next film is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, 'A Confederacy of Dunces'. “We’re beginning to see successes,” says Pollock. “We have maybe 20 or 30 kids working in reality TV.”
How prepared are today’s students for the rigors of video and film production? “They’re remarkably proficient with computer equipment,” says Pollock. “Most of my instructors are older, and these kids come in, and they get it really quickly on a technical level. But in terms of storytelling-and I mean good stories-and telling them in a compelling way, that’s a challenge if you’re 18 or 19. You see some of the same stories over and over again, but there are also students who do individual, quirky, wonderful stuff. Hopefully, they’ll flourish in an arts conservatory environment.”