They once claimed that their service was vital to the preservation and celebration of Australian culture which was not negotiable. Unfortunately, the Australian movie-going public disagrees. When they have secure jobs and they are little more than film administrators and armchair film makers, they should be ground to a pulp and exterminated. I still impose a life time ban on them because of their gobsmacking public servant incompetence.

They still believe that a 3% share of the Australian box office of their films is a good showing. Keep sending them hate mail and perhaps Kevin Rudd will shut them down once and for all.

When we asked why, they said the aim of the course was to provide technicians and craftsman for the Australian film and Television industries.

We all thought that sounded fair enough and so set about teaching ourselves all the creative aspects of filmmaking. So we learned by watching films and reading interviews with Directors and cinematographers etc. In the 80’s + 90’s this was the best we could do but unfortunately it was totally inadequate.

I totally agree that Australia doesn’t support enough education in story development but it must be remembered that the emergence and maturity of Hollywood style screenwriting is only a relatively recent phenomenon. 10 years ago there were hardly any books on writing structure but now there are hundreds.

Hopefully Australian educators don’t leave it too long to catch up but it also means that Karel is in the right place at the right time, where hopefully he can ride the crest of a new wave.

I couldn’t agree more Meg.

Local and state Film schools are bullshit. I have 2 degrees in Film. I have known many others with certificates and diplomas and in almost all cases they are a waste valuable time. The teachers are ‘nice’ people but as far their industry experience goes, they never reached any level of success and certainly never enough to be even endeared as a ‘has been’!!!

The only exception is the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Like UCLA and a few other film schools in Russia and London, it’s a hypermega experience one can barely imagine unless you attended. The big difference is budget because that provides the amazing resources and quality of industry expertise involved in training. Unless you are one of the ‘choosen few’ to go there, going the path of private group training like as enthusiastic script groups run by people of knowledge is in my opinion, time productively spent.

My degrees have NEVER assisted me in working in the film and TV industry, in fact quite the opposite as you are often discriminated by those in leading position who got there through the other ways and not a film and education path.

Bottom line:
politicians don’t respect the Arts and don’t see the Arts as a legitimate way to earn a living and ultimately pay those taxes. Politicians by and large are not ‘creative types’ or have a creative understanding. Paul Keating aside, because he was married to an artist who pulled is strings. The arts flourished for 3 years under his watch. Fortunately, she didn’t divorce him until after he was voted off the playing field.

Unless politicians see that creative Arts have a powerful place in generating fiscal policy, their attitudes won’t change and investment in creative arts industry will always remain what it is – a token value.

A few years ago, a friend asked me to help her with a film school assignment. She had to analyse camera movements in a scene from The Last Crusade and write down the director’s intentions with those.

The task was clarified by indicating the exact dialogue lines where the camera movements occurred.

It took me a minute to figure out something was very wrong.

No wonder my friend couldn’t give proper answers:

The teacher had used a PAN AND SCAN VIDEO VERSION and had included every automatic pan in the list of “camera movements”.

Visual storytelling, indeed…

I was also a mature age student at a university undertaking film studies. I too was horrified to discover students being sent away with various technical apparatus to shoot scenes and short films without first being taught the principles of story, let alone the principles of storytelling specifically for the screen. A correctly formated screenplay was a rare occurrence. The concentration on technical ability and achievement was left floundering when students could not produce a legible story. The university system spruiking and leaching from the thousands of students, both local and international, gleefully handing over many thousands of dollars for a piece of worthless paper are a disgrace. Needless to say the standard of film released from these institutions were poor and the ability of the graduates to find work in the industry was very low. Don’t waste your money – teach yourself.

My own experience of Australian university study in film, literature and related areas has been of very poor quality teaching and assessment standards, and often a primary focus on requiring students to adopt the ‘cultural politics’ stances of faculty members in assessment tasks. Often faculty are so commited to their pet political theories that they are very resistant to considering or acknowledging anything that doesn’t fit their pre-conceived speculative and untestable theories.

This is the second blog post in a week I’ve read from an Australian lamenting not being taught basic storytelling skills in the course of completing a degree at an Australian university.