One Reason Why Student Filmmaking Is Actually Bad For You

Producing. There's always been a weird aura around "Producing" at USC. On the one hand, it's the one thing USC does REALLY well. Most of the films made are well-produced, ie look relatively glossy, get finished, are paid for, people survive, Generally, everyone impressed on what a "production" was "pulled" off on limited funds.

On the other hand, within USC a lot of people tend to look down their noses at "Producing" as "unartistic," as if rigging cables and loading film and placing lights OR logging footage and dialogue editing qualify as art.

In any case, producing has this odd aura of being perceived as a glamour job in the real world, and a dirty, boring job within the film school. Both of which are probably misleading...

...but if USC is to be preparing Producers for the "real world," how are we doing? I certainly don't know the statistics of post-graduation, but I have my USC experience to draw upon to demonstrate some inconsistencies.

*One of the most sought after and "valued" aspect of a student producer is his/her ability to get stuff for free. Principally, this applies to labor, which is an unassumed cost on student films. But it also involves finding donations of food, discounts on equipment, grants, and so forth.

Because labor on student films is FREE, we never pay adequate attention to it's COST. Locke argues that our Labor is an extension of ourselves, that by mixing our labor with an object, we then own it. By neglecting true labor costs, and in a sense, using indentured servitude what are the producers gaining?

Well, we say, experience.

Experience in what?

A day spent producing a student film is a day spent looking for deals, discounts, what have you. Finding a suitable, but affordable location. Planning out the best scheme to rent equipment, trucks, and so forth, in order to scrimp and save and keep the budget down. Or maybe two days, or three days. What's the difference? Time and labor is no factor. Only once the day shooting comes can you no longer try to find discounts. And so the producer goes off to work and work and work and work, and in some sense, the measure of a producer becomes how much work they are willing/able to do for free. How many favors are they able to either call upon or weasel. How good of a hustler are you?

Let's take a sample. Producer A is GOOD. He/she can make a few phone calls, line up the normal discounts and make all the arrangments. He/she spends 1 hour and saves $150 for the production. Producer B is also good. He/she pounds the pavement, works 10 hours and is able to save the production $200.

In the Student world, Producer B is "better," more useful to the production. But in the "real" world, where money and time are factors, you'd be paying these producers both a salary and benefits, if you were ethical. At a MINIMUM, all told, you're talking at least $20 per hour. (for small, student-type projects)

Now reevaluate the situation. Producer A costs $20 and saves the production $150, which means a good days work. Producer B costs $200 and saves the production $200. Wait a second.

So what happens?

Producer A does not do student films, they get hired onto jobs and keep getting rehired. Producer B, however, is invaluable to student films, but of no value to anyone else. Ironically, the more valuable Producer B is to student films, the less valuable they are for real films.


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And you see this issue of "free" labor actually damaging films, I think. Many student films try to build sets with the logic that we can get labor for free...while actually building a set is labor intensive. But in free labor, what you actually mean, is worthless labor. You get a bunch of monkey's running around, inefficient, and inexperienced, people building sets who have basically watched a lot of movies and learned how to use an Avid. As a result, one ends up spending a little bit of money renting props and flats, and a lot of Time and Energy to build a set that looks like shit.

If students were actually thinking of labor costs when going out to make films, perhaps the films would be better, and tighter, and stronger. Perhaps, they would keep tiny crews and make smaller stories, trying to ooze out every ounce of creativity to come up with simple, elegant shooting options, as opposed to insisting upon 35mm with huge crews and equipment lists - goods that only become affordable as a result of indentured servitude.

Who knows...it's just a theory.