Director’s
Statement

You’re elated and exhausted. You’ve just completed an original work - a poem, song, painting, film, etc. What do you do now? You’d be well-advised to protect your work by copyrighting it. By simply affixing the word “copyright” or the copyright symbol “©”, the year of publication, and your name asserts copyright protection for your work. It’s so simple and easy, but was copyright ever mentioned in any of the college creative courses you’ve taken? If colleges routinely ignore something this fundamental, what else are they ignoring? 

Unfortunately, there are three pervasive unchallenged academic film school traditions that better serve the institution and faculty than the film student or the film industry: the art school paradigm; the two-semester academic year; and rigid concentrations.

Virtually every film program in the world is based on a similar art school derived academic model: a faculty shepherds attending students through courses, seminars, little projects, and self-funded short films. There are four serious flaws with this model. First, it encourages competition in an industry that demands collaboration. Second, a short film is to a feature film what a short story is to a novel - many shared elements but the novel and feature film are much, much more conceptually demanding. Third, academic programs are taught by academics, not necessarily working industry professionals. Fourth, self-funded short films are a significant additional expense.

The Feature Film Conservatory is a conservatory – students learn feature filmmaking under the tutelage of over 30 working industry professionals, not just academics. These working industry professionals are not just mentors, but also the foundation for a professional film industry network.

A traditional two semester academic year does not use time efficiently. A full-time job is 40 hours per week. Because a college credit hour is 50 minutes in length, not 60 minutes, a full-time student taking 15 credits per semester attends 12.5 hours of classes per week. A traditional 15-week semester, with mandatory breaks, holidays, and exam periods, is 13 weeks long. A full-time student attending classes every day of the week during both semesters, would only attend classes 130 days a year. A full-time student receives only 162.5 hours of instruction per semester, 325 hours of instruction per year.

The Feature Film Conservatory is an efficient, accelerated, full-time degree program that requires five 8-hour days, 40 contact hours per week, for four semesters (44 weeks) for one calendar year. A full-time student attending The Feature Film Conservatory receives 440 hours of instruction per semester, 1,760 hours of instruction per year. Additionally, there is no advantage to prolonging time to degree, with the attendant living expenses and additional college fees, over several years, instead of completing a graduate education in one calendar year and immediately pursuing your career in feature films.

Most traditional graduate film schools segment students by concentration: producing; directing, screenwriting; cinematography; editing, etc. Most are above the line positions. The next time you watch a feature film, notice all the below the line positions in the tail credits. What are the odds that, unless you’re a nepo baby, you’ll be hired out of film grad school for an above the line position?

The Feature Film Conservatory teaches every aspect of filmmaking so that its graduates are prepared to enter the industry with realistic skills, expectations, a network, and career growth potential. My father, a regarded rocket scientist, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He often said that MIT did not teach him engineering, it taught him how to think. Graduates of The Feature Film Conservatory will have mastered feature filmmaking but also learned how to think.

Other graduate film schools offer the same prestigious terminal degree (MFA) and similar educational experiences. The value-add that The Feature Film Conservatory does offer, that no other graduate film school in the world offers, is the opportunity for its students to collaboratively create their independently financed feature film that each member of the class jointly owns and benefits financially from their feature film’s monetization.

Finally, a bell curve suggests that genius is not global in terms of a population or an individual. If you’ve been patted on the head and told you’re the smartest person in the room since preschool, apply to a traditional film school. If you’re like most of the rest of us and are honest and realistic about your own genius, join The Feature Film Conservatory.

A. P. Ferullo
Director of The Feature Film Conservatory at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre