Watersprite talks usually feature a five minute delay. The recording equipment is primed – three identical mechanical crows looming pointedly from each corner of the room. The technical doppelgangers clothed in matching tones of grey signal to each other to coordinate focus and exposure. Everything has to be the same.
The guests file in, on this occasion for the “Should I Go To Film School Talk”. They agree on an seating arrangement, a Question Time mimic, guests on either side of the host. The theatrical contrariness, however, is switched for a congenial concurrence.
Convened on a sore-eyed Sunday morning, “Should I Go To Film School” was assembled to advocate the merits of formal film education. Ceri Higgins of Bournemouth University, Jane Roscoe of London Film School, Ian Sellar of National Film School, and Daisy Gili of London Film Academy featured, each beginning with a short verse on their institutions USP. “Teams working together, bringing out their own skill” emphasized Sellar. “Creating an environment of people working together and producing art” bolstered Gili. “Collaboration is key” stressed Higgins, “it is important that people know how to work together”. By the time it reached Roscoe, there was certainly an expectation. And sure enough – “we don’t specialise on one area … connections and collaborations in the industry is so important”.
“Team” and collaboration were certainly the watch words of the day, the use of making contacts and feeding off the group. Joined in this buzzword lexicon was “story-telling”.
“We aim at producing story-tellers” stated Higgins. “Everyone has to work with scripts”, she endorsed later, “you can tell a wonderful, meaningful story from a mobile phone”. Roscoe concurred. London Film School looked for students with “interesting stories to tell”.
The panel emphasised their inter-relation. Rather than each film school as an island, students from one academy frequently interact with film-makers from other institutions to produce projects. “They are not isolated places; it is not as closed as you’d imagine” explained Roscoe. The whole system is “a melting pot of different perspectives and ideas”.
The problem with a melting pot, however, is that you end up with a homogenous broth.
As each guest screened their respective institution’s show-reels, it was impossible to ignore the remarkable homogeneity. Lingering landscape shots, cloying close-ups on a thoughtful face holding just longer than wished – because that’s what it is to be contemplative – one couldn’t help but sense the usual tropes, frustratingly common across British produced short films. Each school was indistinguishable.
It is obviously unfair to judge whole institutions output from a show-reel, but it appeared to symbolise a larger point. Going to NFTS was little different to LFA, LFS or BU. All preached from the same book. Yes, one could always collaborate, but is that always conducive to the “unique visions” also emphasised? If everyone is learning the same skills, are they going to differentiate as frequently? Why does film have to be about “teams”, “scripts” and “story-telling”?
It was notable, when asked what film schools looked for in applicants, each panel member talked of “interesting stories and experiences” and “a need to communicate”, simultaneously emphasising their already “diverse student cohort”.
And here is the key, seemingly, with film school – you need to have ideas already. You may learn the technicalities of how to use a camera. You may receive instruction on successful script-writing or editing techniques. You may even be exposed to the horrors of film theory. But to truly make engaging cinema, you have to delve into ideas, and that simultaneously means immersing oneself in other areas of study and the outside world. Some will have this already, but to quote Gili, “you need to know what you want to learn”.
Orlando Von Einsiedel, headliner for Watersprite, provides an interesting middle ground. Having pursued a career as a professional snowboarder, Von Einsiedel enrolled in Visual Anthropology at Manchester’s increasingly renowned Grenada Institute. Learning documentary film-making techniques alongside anthropology and cultural theory, the course provided both an understanding of how to use a camera but also a means of understanding wider human society. Von Einsiedel went on to create a succession of nature and snowboarding documentaries, most recently the Oscar nominated VIRUNGA.