Search Results for:
The Wandering Film School: Making Filmmaking More Accessible
Over the past decade, an inspiring group in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been providing young people with a practical filmmaking education in just a handful of days. The Wandering Film School is a group of filmmakers that works to educate its students on both the art and the trade of filmmaking. Every year, a class of young filmmakers embark on a ten-day process to produce a short: learning the theory and practice of visual storytelling.
It takes a village to make a film, and the Wandering Film School work closely together to get their project from pre-production to a final cut. Class members get to choose a crew role that they have an interest in and learn on-the-job with access to professional advice, as well as professional gear – including our Misfit Kick Mk II matte box.
One thing that has always been important to me at Wandering Film School is that students use industry grade equipment. My goal is to familiarise them with all the same gear they would find on some of the biggest sets around the world. And the Misfit Kick is one of those pieces of gear: students get to handle and use the same matte box that was used on some of their favourite movies. So that one day when they step foot on a production of that size, they know what to expect and aren’t scared off by the gear.
– Hrvoje Bazina, ASBH
The 2024 students completed their production – a music video for local band Limunati – over just two days in December. With a wide range of setups and lighting conditions to plan for in a narrow time frame, the Misfit Kick helped manage exposure and match the creative vision that the crew had.
Without the worry of providing their own gear, the Wandering Film School class can springboard their creative careers – but graduates from the school still come back year-on-year to mentor new classes. Hrvoje Bazina, an ASBH-accredited cinematographer, got his start with the Wandering Film School and now teaches incoming students. Others like Barbara Bubalo never imagined themselves in a mentor role until they were, and now can’t imagine themselves as anything else.
I would say good education and connections are the biggest obstacle for young people wanting to break into the film industry. Nowadays the internet is filled with so much information on every topic you can imagine, however not all the information is good information. So for someone just getting started it can be very hard to navigate through which advice is actually good and which they should avoid. And then of course, we all know how important connections are to making it in the film industry. So until they meet the right people who will give them an opportunity to work on set, it can be very hard to break into the film industry.
We try to tackle both of those issues. We do this by making sure that all the information we feed our students are industry-proven techniques, and things that we know work in the field. We don’t overwhelm them with unnecessary information, as our goal is to get them ready for set. All of our Educators and Mentors are people who are currently actively working in the film industry. That way our students not only get to learn how it’s done at this very moment, but they also get to connect and network with active industry members, which can lead to future gigs for our best students!
I believe that beyond the fact that we are just educating future filmmakers, what makes us stand out is that our goal is for our students to actually have a future outside of the WFS. Most of us running this program have gone to film school, and we’ve seen what a small percentage of our colleagues actually ended up working in the industry. We also recognize what a struggle it is to go from film school into the real world. So this is something that we have always tried to bridge with our program: by ensuring that we give students the experience of a film set first and foremost, rather than having them sit in a classroom, listening to lectures for hours on end.
Our goal is that after this program, students can step onto virtually any set and get right to work with no hesitation. It should already feel familiar to them, rather than something they’re experiencing for the first time.
– Hrvoje Bazina, ASBH
It’s an inspiring program, and at a time where it is harder than ever to break into the film industry, the Wandering Film School is making a difference.
Share:
