Why Film Students Aren’t Special

Me included.

You are not a superstar. You are a piece of a puzzle. A part of an equation. You do not deliver babies. You do not cure disease. You do not put out fires.

You are a craftsman. And just because that craft happens to have become America’s new favorite past time, does not make you a professional baseball player. You are not a snowflake.

ALSO: THE FIRST RULE ABOUT FILM SCHOOL IS, YOU SHOULD REALLY STOP TALKING ABOUT IT.

For a profession which requires countless hours of work and dedication in the real world, I have never met a lazier, more entitled group of people. I don’t know how things operate at other schools, but I would assume that soon-to-be doctors don’t try to finagle their way out of residency. IF you insist on acting like you are doing God’s work, how about actually doing it?

Granted, there are people who actually put in the effort. They work on film sets in their spare time. They help out on friend’s projects. They do things.

However, I hate these people the most. I hate how “film school” is looked at with such an heir of pretension.

I sometimes wonder how the buildings manage to contain all of the egos that reside in them, without literally bursting at its seams.

It must be remembered that you are still a student, we are still students. You are not yet the filmmaker that you fantasize to be. We can all stand to learn things from one another. Just to let you know, that is why we are here in the first place — to learn.

So please, as someone who is not heavily integrated in my own film school’s “student-film-set-hierarchy”, I beg you to make it more accessible to those of us, who may want to be writers, or script doctors, or location scouts, or media studies majors, but who also would like to have a go at production-related things, while we’re still in school and while the stakes are minimal.

I hate how people act that you are less than if you do not participate in this culture. I hate how people use unnecessary amounts of jargon to keep this close-knit group closed off to outsiders.

For a field that requires so much collaboration and social skill, it is surprising how little collaboration occurs.

I understand that a lot of these things I have mentioned are put in place with the goal of efficiency; that in the real world film costs thousands of dollars a minute just to have set up, and that every moment wasted is money down the drain, really — I do understand this (I go to film school, too).

But, while we’re all still STUDENTS I think it would really behoove everyone to swallow their pride just once, smother their ego for a moment, and take the time to absorb information, do the job right, and maybe even help out a classmate who may not know.

It’s not to be overlooked that the professors are just as bad. As many are struggling artists themselves, they see their students primarily as their “side-job”, their fallback plan. Listen- I’m sorry your documentary about cats didn’t win at the Youtube Film Festival, but I’d really love someone to actually teach me a software, or a film set procedure without assuming that I already know it.

I sometimes feel as though we all have this attitude that we're lucky to be here, like we are the chosen ones, that not chasing after these opportunities is your own fault. But, I think we often fail to remember that we aren't the chosen ones as much as we chose to be here. This institution owes us just as much as we owe it, if not more.

Finally, I know that not all film students are egotistical douche bags. Many of them happen to be my friends. I know there are plenty of people who do all the work and then some, while finding time to help out classmates — and to those people, I’m sorry. But as a student myself, I’m merely reporting what I have been witness to the past three years of my educational career, and that on the whole is a bunch of whiny, entitled, conceited “artists”, who are worried about making a name for themselves and nothing else. That is not what film is about. That’s not why I love film, that’s not why it continues to be a $10.6 billion dollar a year industry.

Film is all about accessibility, about pleasing the masses, about allowing your average Joes to escape their lives for a few hours every weekend.

We all need to take a big ‘ol bite of humility and swallow it whole. We are not special, but if we do it right, we might be lucky enough to be a part of something that truly is.

Love,

Hannah