I have someone in my immediate family who is learning to be a filmmaker. My 20 year old boy’s lifelong wish is to make films. He has interest and dedication as well as a lot of innate talent. Regrettably, he is dyslexic and has never went to a traditional school, and the idea of having to attend a film school is making him anxious. However,, he is too fervent to give up thus he discovered another means of learning.
So he did what anyone with a desire ought to do in the first place: he took responsibility for his own dream, and became, in a sense, his own teacher.
When he was on 2nd grade my boy started homeschooling and with the discovery of his dyslexia we need to use alternative methods of teaching for him. We need to convert his home school into anything more or less similar to a film school when he decided to study in order to become a filmmaker. We made a high quality camera and PC an outlay We turned movies into classes and read many books on moviemaking and storytelling aloud and we also talked about ideas for a film. As he studied movies and books about films, my son was astonished at how many of his favorite directors had never been to (or completed) film school – people like Christopher Nolan, Robert Rodriguez, and even Stephen Spielberg. If they could do it, he supposed, he can do it.
But perhaps the most significant part of his education in studying to be a filmmaker was actually in making two short films. He used the tales in his mind and wrote a script. He storyboarded his screenplay and planned the shot list, just like the textbooks had told him to do. Friends and family members were recruited to be part of the cast and crew, he even held a casting call at a modeling school located in our neighborhood. He visited places to look for shooting locations and acquired the necessary papers in order to be able to film there. He experienced the harsh reality of making a film when he made his first short film. But by the second short movie, he understood a lot more about what he was performing. He anticipated the unexpected (as much as possible), and took things in stride, thinking more on his toes and making changes on the fly when required. On the location, he acted like a professional.
Today, my son’s second short movie is entered in contest in film festivals around the nation, and is getting seen by people in the industry. He is writing the script for his first full-length film, and plans to use his short film as a “calling card” of sorts, to show what he can do and secure financial backing for the full-length movie when the script is complete. This is my boy’s ongoing journey of studying to be a filmmaker.