The 40 Minute Film School Report

Posted October 13, 2017

Share To

 

  TweetEmail

OK

It was a kind of an experiment.

Can I teach a group of people to make perfect films in 40 minutes?

We finally got going about 7:15 and by 8PM it seemed I had proven the point.

For those of you in VJ, it will be familiar ground. Go to a restaurant, find the seven events that you find most interesting (note: not one person ever says 'an establishing shot', or 'I have to interview the owner of the restaurant' - not one, in 30 years of doing this), and then, the Cut The Carrots lecture.

40 Minutes.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but as Lisa always says, you can learn the rules of chess in 40 minutes, but it takes a lifetime to master the game.

So I laid out the rules, or rather... I simply asked the right questions

-What do you find interesting

-Where does your eye go

-What do you want to see next.

And remarkably, the people in the room knew what to shoot and how to shoot it.  They had always known. They just did not know that they knew.

If you read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, then you know his basic thesis: If you do anything for 10,000 hours, you are a world expert. Play chess of 10,000 hours and you are a chess expert. Play tennis for 10,000 hours and you are a tennis pro.  Play the piano for 10,000 hours and you are a concert pianist. 

Well, by the time you have reached the age of 30, you have already seen 30,000 hours of TV or movies. That makes you 3 time a world expert in film and television production. You already know how to do this. You just don't know that you know.

What the 40 Minute Film School does is unleash that knowledge.

It makes you aware of what you already know how to do, and it explains how to do it.

This is why I find things like film school so absolutely reprehensible. They charge as much as $65,000 a year, for years, to teach people what they already know.  

We can do it in 4 days - the whole thing - including legal and business stuff - or online.

So was it a success?

I think so.

So much so that we are going to do it again. If you want to attend, drop us a line and we'll hold a space - they are limited. We'll be posting the official sign up soon.