Highschooler: Do Schools Do This??

College Search & Selection
1

I am currently a freshman in highschool looking for potential career pathways that I could take, and I am gravitated towards animation and video producing, and throughout school, I was assigned projects to make a video, or a presentation. Every time I was assigned these projects I worked very hard on them and produced videos with basic animations and simple use of a green screen and while in the process of making these videos, I was enjoying it greatly.
I have acknowledged taking this career path, But upon research, as video producing fits under the category of “art”, it appears that I am too late to get into a good college without much prior education in the field of art and video producing, and my brother and father advised me to make sure if this was the case or if I could maybe start to learn in college.
As of my highschool schedule, I would have to drop orchestra to take video producing and I don’t think I am able to make that decision as of yet, because I excel also in music, which could develop into a career path. So basically, I want to know if there are any colleges that don’t require way too much knowledge regarding video producing and can teach me so I can adapt a career. For reference, I am in all GT classes and my unweighted GPA being around 3.85.

My classes are of the following:
Algebra 2 GT
US History GT
English 9 GT
Orchestra GT
Biology GT
and French I

My knowledge regarding animation or video producing is basic skills such as transitions, and simple animations accessing trapcode particular, with adobe after effects cs6. Are there any colleges that I can try for or is there anything I can do as of now to not completely devote my life into this field? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

(I don’t really have much of a budget nor a location preference at the moment, and honestly college names wouldn’t mean that much to me but i would really appreciate any information on the current situation with colleges teaching video producing at a standard level.)

2

You’re a freshman! In high school! By no means “too late.” While it can grease the wheels for a talented individual to get into the top film production schools by having a portfolio, you CAN get into film school without previous production credits. That said, again, you’re in the 9th grade: you have 3 FULL years to continue to develop your skills and build a portfolio. Keep taking on projects for school and playing around with programs (self-taught is pretty common), take some summer courses if you can/want to, or even online courses. Search YouTube for how-to videos. In fact, I’d say if there’s something you’re passionate about and want to make videos about, starting a YouTube channel would give you an avenue/motivation to develop your skills.

Other than that, the best thing you can do is continue to do well in school. Don’t drop orchestra if you like it (do things in high school that you enjoy!), but by all means if your school DOES offer any video production classes, or has something like a “morning announcements” news team you can join (if they’re filmed/broadcast like that), do that. Your best assets for getting into a good film production school will be a strong GPA, test scores, ECs, and a video portfolio of some kind. Don’t try to force anything now–generally it will be short films/student productions from junior/senior year that will most aptly demonstrate your skills/potential. For now, just do things for fun, as practice/learning exercises. Also, there’s a difference between straight-up film editing and film animation/graphic animation/design, so as you explore techniques and make videos, you will need to figure out what you like best. Film school is where you’ll learn nitty-gritty basics for film/video editing, but if you decide you want to be, say, an animator (Pixar, video games, etc.), that’s a different path/major, etc.