What My Filmmaking Degree Abroad Taught Me?
My Masters in Film & Video production from American University has taught me a lot of things apart from just the technical know-how and creative aspects of filmmaking. Some of the things I learnt are:
Adapting to New Cultures – ‘Adapting to new cultures’, while exploring different aspects of filmmaking goes a long way in one’s learning process. It was interesting to learn how people from different cultures viewed the same concept from different perspectives. I learnt this while working on an assignment about ‘target audience’ for which we chose to analyze the film ‘Titanic’ and gathered responses from a cross section of students across different streams and nativities. It was also an enriching experience to have team members from different countries to work on this project as all of us more or less had the same views about the concept and that helped us in the scripting and execution process of the entire project as well.
Importance of Research – Every project that I worked on during my Masters in Film & Video production introduced me to new concepts. The project parameters were always very clearly defined and that helped me a lot to understand the ‘importance of research’ and enhance my research skills. We were always asked to submit a step-by-step development of the assignment starting with the synopsis to the final draft of the script and without doing a thorough research that was not possible.
One such project was a short film that I made about ‘influence of advertising on teenage girls’ and how it leads them to problems like anorexia and bulimia. It was interesting to see how my team members – an American and a Korean had similar opinions about the topic and how our research proved that the problem persists among teenagers throughout the globe. We had fun shooting the video with an all-girls cast and crew and our film was also well received by few film festivals where we got an opportunity to screen.
Methodical Planning – ‘Methodical Planning’ of your assignments while in school and your filmmaking projects when you start working in the industry help a great deal in coming up with a quality project and the production budget also can be in control. Our professors used to give us timelines for all the submissions and after dividing ourselves into teams, we used to fix our own timelines as well; which always used to be well ahead of the timelines given by our faculty. That kind of a methodical planning helped us to submit all our assignments on time irrespective of any / every unforeseen emergencies which we did face many times either due to weather conditions or due to any technical glitches with the equipment.
Experiential Learning – ‘Learning by doing’ is what all the schools abroad believe in and the same was practiced by my professors at American University too. All my professors have always allowed us to discover our own solutions for the challenges that arise while testing new equipment or while working with challenging actors. This practical ‘experiential learning’ methodology has helped me unlearn a lot of things and learn a lot of new perspectives which I was not aware of earlier.
Collaborative Environment – The success of a film or any media project is not based on the efficiency of the team leader alone but it depends a great deal on the collaborative efforts of all the team members. I was fortunate enough to always have good team members for all my semester projects. They were people from different countries and nationalities from across the globe. Working on projects with all of them was not only interesting but was also an enriching experience as I got to learn about different cultures and traditions during the process of my interactions with them.
While working on projects of various nature even after graduating, I observed that the collaborative efforts of my team members always resulted in the best solutions while executing our production or post-production activities.
In India, when I worked as an Assistant Director for a documentary film, I observed that the cameraman of the film was little reluctant to lift and shift his camera equipment from one location to another and expected the assistants to do it all. Also, in another situation I observed that though the chief technician was handling his work by himself and helping his assistant directors to move things around, he was mocked at by the rest of the crew on the set. These kind of situations don’t arise in the U.S. as I found that there is ‘dignity of labor’ and respect for each other’s work. The top person on the set always knew what the bottom person was doing as that person would have been involved in similar tasks in the past and the bottom person often had ideas on how the top person can execute the idea. This kind of a collaboration always ensured a healthy work environment on the set and that’s something any filmmaker must adopt and practice.
Clean-up after Pack-up – In India, whenever I visited a shooting set after pack-up, I have mostly found them to be very dirty and messy as most of the production teams don’t ‘clean-up after pack-up’. Hence, many people in India hesitate to rent out a place for a film shoot. This is one important thing which we were enforced upon by all our professors during our class assignments to ‘clean-up after pack-up’ irrespective of the activity being for a class assignment or a semester end project.
Apart from all that I have elaborated in my writing and the technical skills that I have equipped myself with; one thing I have definitely learnt from my filmmaking degree abroad is that Administrative skills, Discipline and Professionalism go a long way in making any person successful in the creative industry. A degree abroad not only equips us with the latest trends and technologies but also teaches us to adapt ourselves easily; to any unforeseen circumstances that might arise at the workplace.
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pratima jaidev
Head - Internships & Portfolio Development Pratima Jaidev is a media professional with 18+ years of work experience across various industry verticals which include the corporate (IT) sector, media houses, educational sector and more; both in India and in the U.S.