Post School ?

I don't know anything about that school but, after seeing what students know when they finish school, my skepticism about film school continues. I believe it is good for some people and not good for others depending on what field they want to enter. After working in post sound on features and TV for a number of years, I would suggest considering an internship someplace or even offering some sound houses to work as an apprentice for free. You could put some of that $20K you'd spend on school on a Mac and Pro-Tools and put the rest toward rent while you learn from working pros.
 
I majored in "Audio for Visual Media" in the Audio Arts and Acoustics program at Columbia College in Chicago, and I must say that being in that environment for four years (to get a BA degree), it really helped me to get good at sound editing/mixing/film making, in that it provided the basic knowledge first, then the equipment for me to get good on second. Film school is really only good for just the right people who really take advantage of it. I've seen so many people drop out of film school, or old friends of mine who graduated, but are out selling home theatre systems, not doing anything in the creative field. They expected to be handed a job when the schooling was over, and failed to be aggressive enough and take every advantage possible during the schooling. I did more "extra curricular" film projects than anyone else in my major, and I can definitly say that I learned more from those projects than from any of the class projects I ever did at Columbia.

If you're looking to go straight into a job, the best bet is to get an internship at a studio and move up from there. If you're a badass intern, you'll likely move into a paid job much quicker and you can learn from some pros and practice the craft on the side.

There's really so much to be said on the topic and I wish I had more time to talk about it.
 
Thank you. Hypothetically if I wanted to attend school for this would you recommend a dedicated post school?
 
dave310 said:
Thank you. Hypothetically if I wanted to attend school for this would you recommend a dedicated post school?
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I would go to a "film school", because a film school will have filmmakers in training for you to work with. A post school doesn't have that. Columbia is the biggest film school in the world, and I always had a lot of people to work with and practice my craft with. Now that I'm LA, a lot of those filmmakers are now here still making films and I'm still working with some of them.
 
I didn't go to a "technical" school, so I can't really comment on that. I will say that I and most people I know will agree that I learned 100 times more in the real world than I ever did in school. On the job training has been so helpful. Humanwire is absolutely correct about internships. If you bust your ass and show genuine enthusiasm your bosses will take notice.
 
Brad S. said:
I didn't go to a "technical" school, so I can't really comment on that. I will say that I and most people I know will agree that I learned 100 times more in the real world than I ever did in school. On the job training has been so helpful. Humanwire is absolutely correct about internships. If you bust your ass and show genuine enthusiasm your bosses will take notice.
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On that note, because of all of the practice I had in film school, from having the equipment and the filmmakers around, when I do get my chance to officially jump in the mixer's/editors chair I'll already know what it is I'm doing (I'd like to think:happy:), and there will be a far smaller learning curve. Being employed or interned at a great place and being a genuinely cool person to work with is only half the battle, knowing what you're doing once you get that shot is also really important.
 
Humanwire said:
On that note, because of all of the practice I had in film school, from having the equipment and the filmmakers around, when I do get my chance to officially jump in the mixer's/editors chair I'll already know what it is I'm doing (I'd like to think:happy:), and there will be a far smaller learning curve. Being employed or interned at a great place and being a genuinely cool person to work with is only half the battle, knowing what you're doing once you get that shot is also really important.
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Humanwire, I'm not trying to discredit you or technical schools, so I apologize if I came across that way. I totally agree that people should have some idea of what they are doing before going into an internship because these days companies expect that. It's just that many of these schools are so expensive that I'm just saying it might be a good idea for some people to take some of that money to move to an area that has a lot of post work (like LA or New York) and work for free to get on the job training and, more importantly, start building working relationships with people in the industry. Knowing what you are doing is obviously extremely important, but technical schools are not the only way to learn and I was trying to convey that in my non-eloquent way.
 
Brad S. said:
Humanwire, I'm not trying to discredit you or technical schools, so I apologize if I came across that way. I totally agree that people should have some idea of what they are doing before going into an internship because these days companies expect that. It's just that many of these schools are so expensive that I'm just saying it might be a good idea for some people to take some of that money to move to an area that has a lot of post work (like LA or New York) and work for free to get on the job training and, more importantly, start building working relationships with people in the industry. Knowing what you are doing is obviously extremely important, but technical schools are not the only way to learn and I was trying to convey that in my non-eloquent way.
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I agree. And despite my $50,000 of school loan debt, I think it was totally worth it to go to the school I did. If the film industry were to ever collapse or something, at least I'll have a BA to help get me a regular job. What I was saying before was that if you want to just go straight into a job, to do what you suggest.

The film school route is definitely more expensive, but I feel made me far more well rounded in knowing what I'm doing. For example, I don't just know that there are wav files on my computer and I can move them around and change the volume of them in Pro Tools; I know ever detail about how they were created. How the sound of a door slam sends out energy pressure waves, picked up by a microphone, transduced into an electrical analog of that pressure wave, then it's sampled digitally, so on and so fourth. I can troubleshoot just about any problem I have on just about anything at any step in the chain. I'm not oblivious to what's going on at each step of every process. I love science and physics, so maybe I just like all of this information so that I can visualize and know what's going on at each step of the process.

You might not ever get all of this information by working in a studio, as someone might not ever take the time to tell you any of this, which might keep you from being a self-sufficient, fully functioning recording engineer/editor/mixer. This is how I feel. I don't suppose there's anything you couldn't learn from a book, but I received practical experience with a lot of things, which is even better than reading it in a book. What do you think?
 
I think I will go there just because many major studios send there workers there and they have good job placement
 
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