I should get to bed since it’s past 1 and I have to get up at 8, but why not regale you with tales of the film school application process while it’s still fresh in mind?

Applying to film school was something I thought I would do before coming to UCLA (and ironically, that’s why I took History of Musicals… I thought it would satisfy a theater prerequisite… D’oh). Then I got waylaid and seduced by other majors before ultimately deciding last fall that I would need to apply to at least give myself a shot. I don’t think I’ll mind terribly one way or the other in regards to acceptance, but I know that if friends of mine got accepted and I didn’t even try, I’d beat myself up over it.

I didn’t do much work over Winter Quarter, though maybe I should have, and really started to pick it up the last few weeks and Spring Break. There are three main components to the application that we have control over (hard to tell people what to write in Letters of Recommendation), and they are the Personal Statement, Critical Essay, and Creative Supplement.

As my journal could show you, I’ve had many, many different attempts at each of these. Some are well-conceived, others are pretty bad, and some are just plain illegible…

For the Personal Statement I bounced between quite a few different ideas. Some were very cocky and vindictive, declaring that I didn’t need film school because I had the belief in myself that I’d be successful regardless. I didn’t know how well the jackass technique would play with the elderly film school advisors, so I toned it down and tried to channel a more imaginative, childlike essay.

This consisted of me explaining why I wanted to volunteer and help children instead of take a film prerequisite, and that seemed a little off-base, but I’m sure plenty heartwarming. That led to a massive rhyming manifesto that I thought was really cool and would stand out and they would either love or hate it… and then my brother came in with his cool wisdom. He said that my application should stand out for its quality. Rhyming would just make it stand out pointlessly…

I wrote a normal personal statement (still has some rhymes in it!), one that doesn’t attack the school too much and also states stuff about me, personally. They are really frustrating to right, as I’m sure you remember from applying to college… how do you cut down your whole self to two pages?

The critical essay does not have many cool stories, other than I was going to write about television until I went to the informational meeting and they basically shot down television as an inferior form of media…
As for the creative story, it ranged from a college kid who went home after graduating and is disillusioned about how to attain success to a story about a village that fends off weekly dinosaur attacks and how life is lived in that kind of world to a father competing with his son to sell lemonade.

Yeahhh… If you would like to read any or all of these, let me know. I’d be happy to show them to you.

Thank you to everyone in the past few weeks who has asked how the application is going, made sure I wasn’t going insane, helped me find grammatical errors or alter complete plot points. It all helped, and if anything is to come out of this, it was really a group effort.

The next step, for those wondering, will happen in a few weeks when they send out e-mails to those who get interviews. If I’m fortunate enough to make it to that step, I will interview (supposedly torturous), and then find out in July.

As for my feelings about the whole process, I obviously feel relieved to be done. It did take a lot of time, and kept me from doing more schoolwork/exercise/creative stuff/friendly hang-outs over the past few weeks, but I did it. That may not count for much in the long run, but to have edited three pieces of work to what they finally become is something of which I am proud. They are good pieces of writing, and while I hope the film school recognizes it, I’ve talked to too many people who didn’t go to film school and still entertain people in the medium to get down about not getting in.

As Kurt Vonnegut says, so it goes. I’ve had a pretty good streak of applications and interviews over the past year, but streaks eventually break, and who knows what kind of motivation would come out of this?

It’s now out of my hands, so I’m going to put my hands back to work.

Thank you all again.