technical and affordable cinematography education in two years or less

Fedor Ilitchev · September 15, 2010

Hello,

I am presently looking for schools where I can study cinematography.

My ideal course would be something like this:

- ~3-5 hours of class per day

- around 1 year in length

- cover all the important artistic but also (and especially) technical aspects of cinematography

- involve many (4+) projects

- involve a lot of shooting homework (whether on digital, super8, slr or dslr)

- allow me to get industry contacts

- not cost too much ($5000/year)

- be in a country where I speak the language (languages I am comfortable in: English, French, Russian, Spanish (with a little work))

- contain cool and creative people (optional but very desirable)

- when I walk out of this course, I want to be in a position where, if someone were to hand me a script, I would have both the artistic intelligence to decide on a proper way of lighting it... and the technical know-how to actually do it. Ok, maybe the first part is a bit of a tall order to be learned from a course - but the technical part is a must.

That's pretty much it. So far, I've encountered programs that seem to offer this kind of thing in a one month intensive course (NYU) and others that require two years (in India and Mexico)...and then there are others that are just awesome but hard to get into and take way too long (VGIK). While I do consider most of these to be very real options for me, I'd like to know a bit more of what's out there prior to committing to a decision. So, if you're aware of a school which may fit what I'm looking for, I would be grateful to hear about it.

Oh, and if you have any questions about me, you're more than welcome to ask and I will do my best to answer. For now, it should suffice that I am 26 year old male with a university education in philosophy and computer science.

Thank you for reading,

Fedor

PS, if the school also has a focus on regular photography, I would consider that a plus... aside from any advantages that skill may confer on a cinematographer, in and of itself, I just love still photography.