If your plan is to go to film school, think again: a film degree will not help you with your filmmaking career and has the additional disadvantage of also being thoroughly useless in the employment marketplace in general, with film degrees rated second most useless by Forbes and third most useless by Yahoo Finance. I think it’s fair to say that if you borrow a large amount of money to go to film school and then find yourself completely unemployable, your life will be miserable for many, many years — and forget about having the focus and peace of mind you will need to practice your filmmaking skills with that kind of debt burden on your shoulders. If you are constantly stressed out of your mind, your creative pursuits won’t be going very far (and few things gnaw at your health as effectively as chronic stress). In short, my message to the youngsters is this: be wise and listen to your parents, who I am sure are telling you exactly the same thing. By all means go to college, but study a serious degree with real employment prospects. If university education is free in your country, obviously you can take more risk with your subject choice; if you have to borrow large sums of money to finance your degree, subject choice is a make-or-break decision. The wisest young filmmakers will plan their non-filmmaking careers as seriously as they would if they were not interested in filmmaking at all. The others — those who sacrifice mainstream employability to focus on their filmmaking — should realise that they are likely to run into difficulties. I hope that plenty of parents of aspiring filmmakers are reading this, because youngsters tend to be refractory to this kind of advice.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 09:09:21 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015