Film Colleges

Tired of uploading home movies to sites like YouTube? Anxious to make it to the big screen? Learn how film colleges separate the amateurs from professionals. With a few years of formal training, who knows where you might end up?

Film Colleges

In an age when anyone with a camera and video software can make feature-length movies, why do we still pay top dollar to go to the theater? What separates the thousands of free, user-generated videos from the select handful of movies that make it to the big screen?

There exist 1001 different reasons, ranging from budget and actors to marketing and politics. However, what truly separates the amateurs from the professionals is education. Over the course of one to four years of advanced training, graduates of accredited film colleges master the full range of skills and techniques necessary to go from good to great.

What Can You Learn from Film Colleges?

What you learn in film colleges ultimately depends on which career in the industry you wish to pursue. Directors and cinematographers, for example, are responsible for capturing the essence and emotion of each scene, and thus, they focus more on:

• composition
• action
• lighting
• framing

Editors, by contrast, work more with software and back-end fixes to smooth out the director's vision and produce finished works that appeal to audiences. And still, you have writers, actors, makeup artists, wardrobe specialists, lighting technicians, A/V technicians and an entire army of support staff behind every major production. Each one of these follows a slightly different education track, covering subject areas specific to their duties.

Film Colleges and Career Outlook

According to the US Department of Labor, the film and video industries are expected to increase 14% through 2018, compared with an average of 11% for most other industries. That's the good news. The bad news is that competition for that 14% growth is expected to be very high as aspiring directors, actors, and writers from all over the country vie for top placement in the industry. The more formal training you receive, the better your chances of long-term success.