How I’d Get a Film Education if I Was 18 Again

[Music] so I started my film career back in 2010 unless you think the start of a career means getting paid in which case I didn't start until 2013 when I got my first check in the mail for the Staggering rate of $50 and I'm talking fake Canadian dollars here so about the same as it cost to park a car overnight in Toronto but in the 12 or so years since then without any formal training or education I managed to grow that into a decent middle class income for myself and since turning 40 last month I've

been thinking a lot about what I do if I had to start out again today and wanted to get a worldclass film education without going to film school and just to be clear I'm not against film school if you can get through it debt-free but for a lot of people out there that's just not going to be a reality but this year during a little side project I've been working on I think I found a way to get an incredible film education for a fraction of the cost of film school and it's something you can

do from anywhere in the world and in case you're worried this is a promotion for my course it's not because in this video what I'm going to try and do is lay out a road map for what I do if I was 18 again and a simple cost-effective method for learning from the best just a couple of quick things I should say before we dive in first this system is not watch YouTube videos why this YouTube University is incredible but I'm talking about taking it a step further and actually picking the brains of established filmmakers

to get personalized advice and information that isn't on the YouTube hom page second this isn't about bashing film school you can make amazing connections at film school who you collaborate with for the the rest of your career and for a lot of people the accountability of a traditional program plus the hands-on experience with gear is incredibly helpful there is nothing wrong with film school and in an alternate life I think I would have really had a lot of fun at one of those programs but I went a different path and by the time I got

interested in taking this stuff seriously film school just wasn't practical financially or TimeWise if you're young and you can find a good program that doesn't cost 50 Grand a year or if someone else is picking up the bill for you I think you'd have a great experience but that wasn't my reality and I don't think it's realistic for a lot of people out there either and third thanks to Riverside for sponsoring this video but more on that later okay so with all that out of the way what am I talking about and what do I

mean by a film education well first off for the purposes of this video when I say getting an education it's not about how to land clients or learning how to use your camera from a technical standpoint because YouTube University a strong work ethic and a ton of practice will get you most of the way there on your own instead I want to focus on the more neglected side of a self-education things like how to find mentors learning how the business side of things actually works and how other people have built their own professional careers from

the bottom up because that kind of experience-based knowledge and advice is much much harder to find online but it's often where so much of the gold is so let me give you a personal example when I was starting out as a photographer I took a 10day workshop with my favorite photo journalist at the time we spent 10 days together shooting in Bangladesh and it was a transformative experience for me honestly when you compare my photos from before and after those 10 days it's it's not like I suddenly got a hundred times better at taking pictures

actually I was probably about the same technically speaking as when we started but I came away with it with something a lot more valuable a plan because yes it was great to learn new tips and tricks on how to use my camera in low light or whatever but the real gold was being able to mine the brain of someone whose career I wanted to model my own on but hearing how he' broken in the mistakes he'd made along the way and the shortcuts he'd found I could actually start to see how I could make this

work for me and I was able to set a realistic long-term plan for how to do it okay so maybe right now you're thinking that's all well and good for you but what does it mean for me and my film education because obviously the answer isn't just for everyone to attend expensive workshops but over the last year or so I've realized that you can get a similar inside perspective from a bunch of different Professionals for much less than what I paid for that Workshop so how then well it's simple just interview them now don't worry

I'm going to explain how I'd go about doing this effectively but over the last year or so I've been interviewing tons of indust Pros both for this Channel and my cinematography course without even realizing that I've been giving myself an incredible Career Education even if I'm almost 15 years into my career at this point and anyone out there can do the same thing regardless of where you're at now and now that I figured out just how valuable these sessions have been for me I got to say it feels a bit like a cheat code so

now let's get into how I started with the system how I'm perfecting it technically speaking and how you can do the same thing to get a real world film Education Without ever setting foot in a classroom [Music] so since starting this Channel and even more so since launching my course I've tried to bring in as many voices from industry experts as possible in the beginning I just kind of called my friends which is one of the perks of having 10 plus years in the business now when I started I just recorded the conversations over zoom

and even though the quality sucked pretty badly the substance was enough to make it worth it but as a cinematographer it was kind of irking me to have such grainy video and after I saw just how bad the quality was after posting a conversation with my former camera assistant rich I kind of realized I had to do something about it then after being a guest on a podcast more recently I asked Valentine the host how he did things uh but yeah just thanks for being here and uh let's chat soon I guess you're welcome talk

soon hey and before I uh get off this call uh we're done recording right I just want to ask you I'm doing a lot of remote interviews these days um and I have been trying to use zoom and it looks terrible but you you sent me a Riverside link why do you Riverside genuinely Riverside is the best tool to record remote conversations this year I just doubled down on doing remote conversations with creators instead of doing inperson stuff it's I feel like the image quality is better just looking at it is that true yes yes

because it's recording on the device and just uploading it to the cloud so it's the best possible video quality so everything is its own little video feed and you get good audio you can even edit on Riverside if you want to so it's like I have not found anything else that works as smoothly as Riverside that conversation reminded me that I'd actually been approached by Riverside months earlier about doing a sponsored video but I didn't really know how it related to my professional worko so I politely declined but after talking to Valentine I dug back

into my inbox I reopened the conversation and luckily they were still down so thanks them for supporting this video and helping make it possible to do all the long form gear test videos we've been doing lately because Without Partners there's just no way we could rent all those locations in gear and as a bonus it helped me dial in a system for recording those conversations in a way that doesn't hurt my soul as a DP but we're going to get more into the technical process of how all this works in a bit because first we

need to talk about why you should seriously think about doing something like this if you're trying to get a film education for yourself and even more importantly before you set up a professional recording system you need to actually find filmmakers who will agree to talk to you because as I've expanded the scope of these interviews I'm finding that there are more and more people I want to talk to that I don't know personally and since so many of those people are super busy professionals I started offering a small speakers fee for an hour and a

half of their time and what I noticed is that my acceptance rate went way up which made me realize that this is what I'd be doing if I were trying to educate myself right now I mean it is what I'm doing but you should do it too cuz if this were 10 years ago and I was just getting going the information I'm getting from these calls would be more than useful it would be invaluable and that got me thinking what's stopping early career filmmakers from starting up a podcast or YouTube channel or blog or whatever

and then just using that as a means to interview the industry people they respect the most to get a worldclass film education nothing is the ultimate answer but obviously it's not that simple because as someone who's highly visible on the internet myself and who gets literally dozens of emails every day from people asking for my time I know that you can't just send a random DM to a talk to your filmmaker and expect them to sit down for a long form interview with you especially if your podcast is brand new and has no audience the

answer here is is kind of equally simple you offer to pay them for their time no now I can already hear the collective gasp from the internet but hear me out these days there's this weird feeling that everything on the internet is supposed to be free but the real world doesn't work that way a larger audience will give you leverage but the point of this exercise isn't to grow a giant podcast it's to learn from the best in the world the approach that almost everyone out there takes and believe me my own inbox reflect this

is just to send an email with a big list of questions asking for help I'm not trying to be cold here but let's be hon for a second this is a terrible approach very few working professionals have the time to craft out long form responses to gear questions or are able to get on a zoom call with you because it's going to help you out they they just don't know you now let's say you send the same email but instead of just asking for free help you ask if you can interview them for your podcast

SL yoube Channel SL website or whatever with just the subject line interview request in the email I'm already taking you more seriously and you'll have a much higher success rate but what if they click on your links and realize that you only have like 12 views per per episode that can be an issue for busy people and that's why I would personally offer a fee in the beginning I'm not sure when people started expecting to get everything for free online but I definitely didn't get that 10-day workshop for free in fact it was the most

money I'd ever spent on anything in my life at the time but once you start offering to compensate people for their time it's amazing how quickly the acceptance rate goes up which makes total sense I'm not saying you have to pay people hundreds of dollars a pop but even A50 or $100 offer goes a long way like imagine being on the receiving end of these emails one email is hey I'd like to talk to you because it would be good for my career development please let me know when is a good time the other one

says I know your time is valuable I don't have much money but I'd like to offer you a $50 gift card as a sign of how much I appreciate the imposition now if you know anything about Toronto where I live these days you'll know that 50 bucks is about the price of lunch but even so it would make me many times more likely to agree not because of the money though but because of the gesture which is a sign of respect and a major differentiator from the hundreds of other people wanting things for free yes

50 bucks or 100 bucks that's real money and yes it would be a lot nicer if it was free but just step back for a second a quick online search showed me that the Los Angeles Film School which is not even an accredited program and seems to be okay at best from what the online reviews say the price of one semester is almost $155,000 for a more established program like UCLA film school it's 20,000 if you live in California and almost 40,000 if you don't and yes if you're lucky enough to be able to pay

for something like that without going into debt you'll definitely make a lot of connections and get your hands on some cool gear I'm sure but if you're taking out loans to pay that it's going to take you half your life to pay that back don't get me wrong I'd have loved to spend four years talking film and meeting people but not for that kind of debt no knock on you if you went but it's just not realistic for most people in the world on the flip side of that you could pay a different filmmaker a

100 bucks a week for an interview every week of the year and still have tens of thousands of dollars left over to shoot your own films or attend networking events and in my experience anyways here hearing how the other Pros have built their career and what that means for you is something you rarely get from film school but it matters so so much when it comes to surviving in the professional market and Beyond the gesture of offering to pay people for their time you're much more likely to get someone to agree to an interview than

a private coaching session like people who are good at what they do often like to share their knowledge and so by giving them a platform to spread what they know it somehow feels different than just asking them to talk only to you if the questions you ask during that interview happen to be Rel to you and what you're trying to do wink wink then so much the better I should say really quickly this is absolutely not a scheme for me to get $50 out of you because I'm going to be on the road constantly until

the spring and even if I wanted to I don't have the time right now to do any interviews just at the moment so please don't bombard me but there are thousands of other people with even more experience than me who are between jobs right now who can talk to you instead if you just take the time to figure out who they are but let's quickly go back to the technical process here because the beauty of this system is that it can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be like I said

as a cinematographer I'm a nerd for visuals and the quality of the recordings went way up just by using Riverside instead of the zoom screen recording and I could push that even further by hooking up my fx3 as a webcam if I wanted to for me just a nice key light and my laptop is good enough but it wouldn't take much extra effort to turn these conversations into professional level video podcasts using the gear I already have Plus instead of one highly compressed file Riverside actually allows for separate local recordings on either end which means

you get clean video tracks of each speaker regardless of the Wi-Fi speeds not only is that going to protect you from shoddy video quality on slow internet connections but it also makes editing much much easier I guess the point I'm trying to making is that this isn't something you need to be a professional cinematographer to do well you can do it with your phone the webcam you already have or you can go all out and rake up a cinema camera but the gear isn't going to stop you here and that's part of why I like

this approach so much and since we're talking about how to do this stuff as cheaply as possible I should probably mention that as part of this collaboration Riverside agreed to knock 15% off your first month so you can try it out for yourself without much risk there's a link below and you can use the code Luke at check out to get that [Music] discount but back to the self-education part because knowing how to set up a great remote interview is only half the battle to really get the most out of a plan like this there's

more to it than just a highres recording like finding the right people asking the right questions and then maybe even thinking about you using the conversations you record to grow something down the line so let's break those down quickly starting with finding the right people now this isn't rocket science but I'm a big fan of list here and the sooner you start building out your own dream list of people to talk to the better and when I say dream list I don't mean putting Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan into a spreadsheet and then hoping this

will all work out because it probably won't at the start you're going to need to be a little more realistic so instead of setting yourself up to be ignored you'll probably want to look for people who still answer their own emails that doesn't mean you have to resign yourself to D Talent though because it's amazing how responsive people will be to interview requests sometimes but only if you approach them in the right way speaking from personal experience a bad interview request usually goes something like this I'm a young filmmaker with a podcast I like what

you make and it would be great if you would come on my podcast here's a booking link to set up a time and I hope to speak soon now there's nothing rude about that or anything but it's pretty one-sided then more often than not I'll click through the link and see their last episode got like 80 views or something and then it gets harder and harder to say yes because busy people tend to be very protective of their time and that's no knock on smaller creators we all have to start somewhere but if you're looking

for experienced people to share their knowledge and you aren't offering large exposure or money it's kind of a tough sell now if we just tweak that a little bit to something like I'm an early career filmmaker and an effort to educate myself and others in my position I've launched a podcast or website or whatever at the moment my audience is still quite small and I know your time is extremely valuable so even though my budget is pretty limited as a small token to my appreciation I'd like to offer you a small speakers fee for 60

minutes of your time suddenly it's a lot easier to say yes at least for me it is and again this won't work for filmmakers so famous that they run other Communications through an agent but with a bit of research I think you'll find you can get access to extremely talented people this way and since at the beginning of your career you don't need to talk to the elite of the elite you just need to talk to people who are better than you are that's totally fine you'll learn a ton and you have no idea where

these connections are lead and just let me give you a quick personal example of this exact plan working for someone because I'm sure there are more than a few people out there thinking there's no way this could work well around 2 years ago I got an email from a filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer named Austin Meyer asking me to do his podcast we had a great conversation and it eventually led to him joining my now closed rip YouTube filmmakers mentorship program and he's been steadily growing his own channel on top of shooting his own projects

around the world all that started with an interview and if that hadn't happened it's pretty unlikely we would have connected in the same way now he did all the hard work and I'm not saying I'm responsible for his success in any way but even a handful of these interviews every year are going to be so incredibly useful and if you do enough of them I think it's totally possible to give yourself a world-class filmmaking Education Without ever leaving your desk and who knows if you actively share the content you're making like Austin does you might

even find yourself a few years down the line actually able to get bigger and bigger names to respond to you short form is probably the easiest way to get started right now just by chopping up the very best pieces of Knowledge from each interview and then uploading them to whatever platform you like and it really doesn't have to take much time at all because one of the great features of using something like Riverside for this instead of just recording your screen is that it will AI generate a full transcription of the entire conversation which you

can actually edit from like you just highlight the text and it will pull that section of the video without you having to scrub through an hour of talking I can't stress how useful that is because it means you could clip 5 to 10 of the best moments of each conversation way faster than you could if you had to review the raw video from start to finish plus it makes makes it much easier for you to scroll back through the conversations you've had and find the parts that resonate with you the most I personally don't rewatch

many of the interviews I do but I do go back to the transcriptions pretty often to find stuff quickly and text-based editing speeds that up so so much so the fact that this is just kind of built into the back end is a great bonus I seriously wish I'd thought of this about 12 years ago because when I was early on in my career it sometimes felt impossible to find people to talk to just like everyone else I was always sending out random DMS to people I thought were cool and never really hearing back or

I'd shoot off like 20 emails in a day telling them how excited I was about film making and how much of a help it would be for me if they could give me some tips and I just didn't understand why I never got responses now I understand that I was being really selfish because my Approach was all about what was best for me if I just come at them from a slightly different angle and made the exchange more of a value proposition for us both I think I could have booked those calls and avoided a

ton of mistakes along the way when I started these kind of workflows weren't really an option and in the end I had to pay like 10 grand to a photographer to show me the ropes but I wonder what would have happened if I had taken that money and spent it on a th000 interviews instead oh no regrets on the workshop because it changed my life for sure but it's interesting to think about what I could have learned if I'd had a Riverside account and just a fast Wi-Fi connection back in 2012 and I'll just say

it one more time before we wrap up I am not saying all of this to try and get a 100 bucks out of you and appear on your podcast I have a crazy travel schedule coming up and I'm not going to have any time to do anything until well in 2025 so please don't send me an interview request PR right now after watching this because you can bet probably 50 other people are doing the same thing take the time to do the research and find the right people and then reach out the right way and

then you'll be getting yourself a better film education than a lot of the film schools out there at least that's what I think anyways but feel free to disagree with me in the comments and thanks again to Riverside for sponsoring this video and helping us make bigger and bigger content because jokes on you guys I'd be using it anyways check out the link in the description to save 15% on your first month with the code Luke and happy interviewing see you [Music] oh [Music]