<p>KupLor94,
You are right, NYU isn’t good at all for FinAid, even for US students.</p>
<p>Now, for the “Chicago Film School”, are you talking about Columbia College Chicago? I’m pretty sure that is not an accredited school, but it is non-profit. Columbia College Hollywood is a different school, located in LA, and is accredited. Both are art schools, so they may not have the LAC feel you are looking for.</p>
<p>Oh, god, sorry! I totally went wrong! I meant Colorado Film School! I was reading a lot of stuff via internet and wrote something completely wrong! It’s official that I’m going to freaking out one of these days :S Colorado Film School has the combined screenwriting/directing program I was talking about. But it’s in Denver, so I don’t think they have that connection with the studios that Dodge and USC surely have, but it seems a very very good program though</p>
<p>KupLor, unless you crack a top tier film school then you are better off getting a solid English degree somewhere else. Keep in mind as well that you don’t need to go to film school to work in Hollywood. Let me say that again - you don’t have to go to film school to work in Hollywood.</p>
<p>Beyond that, different film schools have different philosophies and graduate different types of filmmakers. USC and Florida State in particular are known for their strong industry focus. NYU and UCLA are known for their independent focus. AFI is probably somewhere in the middle, and CalArts graduates people who make weird artsy stuff that’s interesting to look at but doesn’t necessarily lend itself to narrative filmmaking. And in the case of Chapman, well a good way of looking at it is that USC (overall) wants to be Stanford or Harvard and Chapman wants to be USC. Orange County is painfully lacking in a top private university (they tried to get USC or Claremont to relocate to the old El Toro military base) and UC Irvine is public and still growing but not there yet. Ergo, some donors are focused on Chapman but as the school is still officially religious it can be off-putting to some… USC had a much easier time raising money once it de-emphasized its Methodist ties in the 1900s-1910s and it formally severed its ties I believe in the 1950s.</p>
<p>Also, USC’s critical studies program is most definitely a lesser program. Production takes 55ish students every year, writing 24, Stark 24 (graduate only), and critical studies takes somewhere around 200. With the notable exception of a few fantastic budding film critics, historians, etc., critical studies is almost exclusively the repository for kids who didn’t get in to production or writing.</p>
<p>The difference between critical studies and production/writing is the difference between studying and doing. It’s one thing to sit there and criticize other peoples’ work all day long, but it’s another matter entirely to devote your academic study to learning how to write, direct, and edit great movies. All that critical studies does is give students the ultra-pretentious language of postmodernism with which they can spend the rest of their lives mentally mast-----ing about film as those people seem incapable of understanding the basic truth that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.</p>
<p>Students admitted to critical studies - aside from the budding critics, or people who want to be agents or studio executives - have been comforting themselves with the Bryan Singer story for years. But you’re picking out one person in the history of the school against the 200 (?) admitted every year.</p>
<p>At my graduation, when the chair of critical studies got up to explain to the audience what her department did, my mother laughed out loud and said, “What is this critical studies??? I’d never pay for that sh–!” to which several other parents nodded in agreement.</p>
<p>Oh and I’ve also never heard much good said about NYU’s financial aid program either. Keep in mind that if you go to school there you also won’t formally have much of a campus, opportunities for film in NYC are limited so you’ll end up moving west, and most everyone who goes to school there pays out the nose to live a few subway stops inside Brooklyn. Manhattan from the southern tip up into parts of Harlem these days is generally home to some of the wealthiest people in the world, and that means that you can’t afford to live there. NYU does attract a good amount of Eurotrash, though.</p>