College Life

Private Schools That Are Well Known for This Major

• American Film Institute
• University of Southern California (USC)
• New York University (NYU)
• California Institute of the Arts
• Columbia University

State Schools That Are Well Known for This Major

• University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA)
• University of North Carolina School of the Arts
• University of Texas at Austin
• Florida State University
• University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee

Classes in the Major

Directing. This is the money class. The director is as close as you get to the person in charge on a film set. This is also where most everyone wants to end up eventually, because who doesn't like being in charge? Even if you have no intention of ever directing a film and never wind up doing one out of obligation or because you lost a bet, it's still important to know. Why is that person yelling all the time? What do they want? How does this movie fit together? In understanding the top, you understand the rest.

Editing. Despite the name of the major, most of what you will be shooting on will be digital. In fact, at many colleges, you find this as "Film and Digital Production," and that "film" part is because the hipsters don't want to let it go. Of course, by "hipsters" we mean "Academy Award-winning directors." While in the old days, most editing was physically cutting film and splicing it into other film (like you were making dinosaurs out of frog DNA), now it's mostly done on computers. In the future, who knows what you'll be doing? Something with mutants, we imagine. These classes will teach you how to edit films in the prevailing technology of the time.

Screenwriting. How do those people know what to say on screen? If you said, "Whatever comes to mind," you've been watching too many Will Ferrell movies. In most cases, there's a whole script prepared in advance, and the actors memorize their lines from that. Then they…just sort of repeat them. Screenwriting is the skill of writing those lines, as well as crafting a plot that won't hold up to Internet speculation. Yeah, we said "won't," because nothing holds up to Internet speculation.

Sound Design and Production. Sound design is one of those things you only notice if it's bad. Normally, how everything sounds is a seamless part of a film. Usually, directors want things to sound how they do in real life, or at least how we think they do because we've seen too many movies. In other cases, a director will want a sound that is intentionally odd to make some kind of weird artistic point.

Cinematography and Videography. The perfect shot is the holy grail of film. Many directors ascribe to the nearly impossible goal of wanting every shot to be able to be framed and put on the wall as art. Some, like Sergio Leone, have even succeeded. The cinematographer is the one who does this, and is often credited as a Director of Photography because credits are confusing. Directors will usually have a cinematographer they work with in exclusion to all others, because they communicate well and know the looks that the other wants.