Global Film Academy Deans Forum: The Film Academy Should Train More Film Artists

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Recently, the Global Film Academy Deans Forum was held in Los Angeles, US. This was the first forum during the first World Film Industry Conference, with three heavyweight guests in attendance, including Elizabeth Daley, the Dean of the USC School of Film; Brian Kite, the Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; Susan Ruskin, the Dean and Executive Vice President of the American Film Institute. The forum was hosted by Hollywood filmmaker Jeffrey Locker.

The forum started with the topic "The main challenges for continuing to maintain a high level of film education," and the guests agreed that the prerequisite to keep film education at a high level is to ensure the internationalization of the film industry. Elizabeth Daley said that the conference guests were an international cast, which means that on a daily basis they were dealing with many different cultures and talking about collaboration and collaboration extends also to respect people's cultures, and that in all the master's programs of the film academy were helping students to learn how to communicate with each other and still respect their cultural differences.

Elizabeth Daley said that the most interesting thing to her was to listen to the fellows who were from Australia or Asia or Latin America and how they saw the movies differently and the school had been encouraging them to really connect to those stories on a much more personal basis, and that with an international film education, a director would be from Japan, editor would be from the U.S., others would be from Canada, and the seamlessness about the culture allowed for more openness.

To better attract international students, the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television had focused on developing film artists and reduced some of the skills classes, said Brian Kite, who argued that the academy offered too many skills classes, but technology changed so quickly that they had been spending too much time focusing on technology that wasn't going to be relevant by the time they were making films five years later, so we really needed to think much more about “who are you?”

Elizabeth Daley emphasized that the USC School of Cinematic Arts had made "storytelling effectiveness" a priority in its filmmaking education, meanwhile it had been working on cross-platform research in film education as well as large-scale game program, animation, and interactive media.