Students or Aspiring Professionals? Ethnographic Research of Film School Students’ Production Culture.
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Film schools still represent an important place in national audiovisual industries for the education of new generations of professionals. Nevertheless, the importance of production cultures in film schools remains largely overlooked in terms of analyzing the processes of education and socialization in this specific professional environment. In my paper, I will present a case study of the production process of four graduate films made at the Audiovisual Arts Studio at Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín, Czech Republic in the school year 2024/25. I conceptualize the school itself as an interpretive backdrop for exploring the mechanisms of collective collaboration, problem solving, negotiation and tactical decisions applied by student crew members in the making of their projects, which must comply with the internal rules of production at the school. Meanwhile, graduate films are usually the most ambitious projects made at the school, and their crews want to showcase themselves as aspiring professionals outside the school even though production limitations will sooner or later become apparent. I argue that during making graduate films, the contradiction in the understanding of student crew members as students in school and as aspiring professionals is reflected. On the one hand, student crews have the ambition to push the possibilities of the skills they acquire during their studies. However, on the other hand, they face problems caused by the limited capacity of the school and its internal rules of production, which affect the composition of the crews and the whole process of collaboration during the making of projects. Paper promises to introduce a valuable insight into the unique production environment, which aims to prepare future professionals for work in national audiovisual industries and can enrich our view on understanding of production cultures not only in east-central Europe. |
| Related projects: |