The World's Best Film School Is Free on YouTube | Hacker News Reader

The World's Best Film School Is Free on YouTube

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127 pointsvictorvation9 comments

Great article, but misleading title. These YouTube videos do a good job of teaching armatures (like myself) small details of movie making, but they don’t come close to a film school education (which itself is far away from getting experience making films and working under world-class movie makers)

Yea I feel like a lot of these break downs of film overanalyze and make too cerebral the art of movies.. For example when Sam Mendes was filming American Beauty he said he did not realize the film he was making until they got into the editing room. From all of the youtube movie break downs you would believe that everything was intentional and deliberate and you should already know the movie you are going to make out of the gate instead of discovering and pivoting along the way

For those interested in going deeper, MIT has 'The Film Experience' online and available for download from the Internet Archive [2].

edit: I should also give a shout out to The Story of Film: An Odyssey -- which is an excellent long-form timeline that connects some of the most important films of all time. Definitely worth a watch.

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-011-the-film-expe...

[2] https://archive.org/details/MIT21L.011F13

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Film:_An_Odyssey

While the fast paced editing and tone of these videos are good at seducing the layperson into the looking under the hood of a popular film, they rarely venture beyond the last 30 years of Hollywood film-making.

I'd argue that videos like these could actually be kind of destructive to this new generation of 'content creators', as the narrow and populist gamut of films covered may give the impression that Darren Aronofsky created the jump cut and David Fincher was the first to use low-key lighting. That's perfectly fine for the casual hobbyist who just wants to make their Youtube videos better, but most great cinema is part of a dialogue with film history and you really need to dive a bit deeper and develop a personal relationship with the classics of the form.

Just rushed my way through a BFA from NYU Film. Got more valuable theory and guidance in my thinking from YouTube than most classes.

But learning to light a scene on 35mm and other nuanced technical work requires detailed hands on instruction. College also helped me grow thicker skin and a healthy cynicism. That's about it.

Any other channels on YouTube you can recommend?

Maybe cause you rushed through your classes.

> As of December, Every Frame a Painting is no longer. Ramos and Zhou got busy with other work, and couldn't figure out how to keep doing what they wanted within the confines of both their channel and YouTube's systems.

Noooooooo!

Watch out for the film Lumière, which is reaching theaters worldwide. It's actually a commented compilation of 108 original reels by the Lumière brothers, but as an experience is so, so good.

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