True, but you learn just as much about production in well run productions as poorly run ones. And if you're working for free you really don't have to worry about fucking up and getting fired. If you work on five Craigslist productions (craigslist as a euphamism as nutty free work found anywhere) that each have 20 people on them, you've made contact with a hundred people that are actually motivated and making stuff. Odds are more than one of them wont be totally crazy, and you will like each other, and boom, you've started networking.

Your points are all valid, and at this point it's just a matter of taste, but if finding like minded people are your goal, I would say it's worth it to find peers in the real world. A graduate program will make it easier, but I'm not sure it would make it $150,000 easier.

Been going over John August's podcast the last couple days, and found this episode where they talk about this exact subject. But not until like half way though.

http://johnaugust.com/2011/the-good-boy … s-worth-it

Spoilers: Their conclusion is to the tune of "go if you want but it's not nearly as valuable or important as it was ten or even five years ago". And I agree completely.

Was the Disney merger/acquisition during production? If it did, could have been a problem of suddenly having twice as many creative executives and middle managers swoop in on a project in production to prove their worth.

Maybe it's the other three hours of Ghosts that he didn't reuse for Social Network.

I assume Cars 2 was flawed since the film was an exercise in nostalgia, and everything was geared towards that theme.

Taking the same group of characters and throwing them into some wacky spy scenario probably worked about as well as that episode of Happy Days where they went to space.

Judgements on Brave reserved on the grounds that Pixar trailers are understandably broad and conservative.

I hadn't noticed the "clarified Scot" tint of their accents the first time I saw the trailer weeks ago, but yeah, it makes sense they would do that to help it play internationally.

If that's the case though, think there's a chance that could actually impede on the performances? Like, extra mental cycles have to go towards specific, unnatural enunciations.

But hey could be wrong and that could just be the thing you're getting paid to be a voice actor for. Dunno.

The trick in "talent" is taste, self-criticism, or however you want to characterize the idea of being able to recognize everything you do is crap for a while. It's that ability to pick up on what you're doing wrong and how it can be done better next time that provides the lift from running in circles to a helix with an upwards vector of improvement. (sorry, obtuse spatial metaphor)

I was film school adjacent. My concentration was in "New Media" which the school kind of realized was bullshit, and dissolved it the next semester into Interactive Arts/Web Design/Post-production or whatever. The high level classes were really cool, helped shape the idea of what the media landscape would probably be like for the rest of our careers. My thesis was on how the last century of centralized media industry as an unfortunate consequence of the investment required to operate the technology, and with that diminishing, culture, communication and all that moving into the future will look a lot more like any other century than the 20th.

My college was known largely as a film school, and my diploma says the same thing as all the film majors - Something like Bachelor of Media Arts. All of my friends were film, tv, audio, writing, and performance majors, and a lot of us had the same classes for the first couple years. Joke in the Media History/Criticism classes were that our diplomas was a very expensive license to laugh at Birth of a Nation jokes for the rest of our lives. I found the liberal arts part of the education was just as important as the vocational side.

What you guys were indirectly touching on in the episode was a huge debate within the faculty when I was in college, the departments were all trying to reconcile the academic with the vocational – frankly if they should give a highly detailed extremely through education focusing on one side or the other, or a middling lukewarm education of both.

Could be totally wrong, but I *think* their stopgap solution was to tune the classes towards the academic and liberal arts aspects of film/media, lighten the course load slightly, and encourage students to go nuts with their clubs and extracurriculars by giving them a shitload of money and resources. Actually worked out pretty well, since people that didn't have the drive to learn and make stuff were out of the way. Grade school analogy would be cutting PE in half, doubling recess, and installing a shit load of shiny new playground parts.

Which was awesome, and worked for me. I could go run around on any piece of equipment I wanted, explore and watch films from a vast, well curated media library, realized this shit is the best, moved to LA and made it my job.

Then… don't… see it?

If there's money to make a studio will try to make it. Business.

Anyone seen this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_people_dear_readers

I set up a screening in college then couldn't make it - been meaning to revisit it since.

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Digitus aurum

There are plenty of shitty directors, but Shyamalan's a shitty auteur.

The Mall Tease Falcon

Woolen Garment Shearer's Third Month