sf Art & Film present: The Film Workshop

THE FILM WORKSHOP is offered to students throughout the Bay Area. Students may enter in late middle school and remain through graduate school. Each year new students are taken through all the aspects of professional filmmaking while returning students continue to refine and deepen their skills. The workshop helps students produce work that will let them enter film schools but also are helped to develop a way of thinking about film that will serve them throughout their careers.
We are sponsored by: The National Endowment for the Arts, The Miranda Lux Foundation, The Kaplan Fund, Macy's Foundation, Gary W. Ross, Guerrino & Daniela DeLuca, Michael Zimmer and a number of private donors.
The Film Workshop is the most successful of all of our programs. The films our students have produced have won awards every year since the program's inception, and have been shown in numerous film festivals both in this country and in Europe. Currently we have graduates in the film schools of NYU (Tisch), USC, Sarah Lawrence and San Francisco State. Our students were featured on the cover of Film Arts's RELEASE PRINT, in the George Lucas Educational Foundation's magazine EDUTOPIA and in the San Francisco Chronicle's Datebook section with articles about The Film Workshop as the prime resource for serious teenage film makers in the Bay Area.
The Film Workshop is offered for a nominal annual fee of $1,000. Students who are interested in the program and show that they are able to fulfil the requirements but cannot pay the fee are eligible for a partial or full scholarship.
Film Workshop students are urged to attend as many Cine/Club screenings as possible, because those films are often discussed in depth during the workshop. For the current Cine/Club schedule, please visit www.afcurrent.org We are only interested in students who are genuinely committed to making their films. If a student cannot fulfill the work due, they will be asked to leave the program. Our 2008/09 Film Workshop season starts in October. Students interested in taking part should contact Ronald Chase at rchase@chaseartfilm.com.
Students accepted into the program will need a digital camera with a manual adjustment option. A two or three chip camera is best. Scholarship students can arrange to borrow cameras to make their films. We try to help students install Final Cut Pro on their computers at home so they can edit their own films. (We cannot work with Premier.)
The Sunday Workshop schedule is quite intense and requires a good deal of focus and energy. Here's a rundown of the routine for 2007-2008. 11am: We screen a film and discuss theme, film techniques, metaphor, etc. as it plays. The films scheduled this fall include: Anderson's IF... Antonioni's BLOW UP Olmi's TREE OF THE WOODEN CLOGS Balabanov’s BROTHER and the short films of the English dance company DV8 1pm: We provide lunch. 2pm: Students share location photographs they've taken since the last meeting, which are discussed and critiqued by the group.
2:30pm: Students view one of our lesson DVDs: LESSON ONE - Film History & Point of View LESSON TWO - Visual Concepts LESSON THREE - Space, Movement & Emotion LESSON FOUR - Montage LESSON FIVE - Shaping and Orchestrating Scenes LESSON SIX - Imagery, Symbolism & Metaphor LESSON SEVEN - Intercutting, Music & Sound LESSON EIGHT - Comparisons of Style Students are asked to produce over the next two weeks a 1-2 minute film that illustrates that they understand the principles of the lessons. Naturally some of them fall behind, but they continue to work through the spring to catch up.
3:30pm: Beginning students work with Salome Milstead, one of the media instructors at the School of the Arts, and our editor Jesse Filipko, to help them prepare their lesson films, and go over production and editing principles they need to learn whether it's learning Final Cut Pro, working with the camera, developing treatments, story-boards, etc. Advance students discuss and plan for their upcoming projects and develop treatments for new work with Ronald Chase and writing mentor Isaiah Dufort.
4:30pm: We review all the footage and works in progress and everyone gives their feedback. Time is also made for screen tests. 5:30pm: Students share stories about things they have experienced or seen that might be interesting, which helps them develop story telling techniques. Afterwards: Students are required to send in an assessment of the day where they discuss what they learned and the positives and negatives of the day for them. This helps the student to remember what they’ve learned and it helps our staff identify what is working and what need to be reviewed.