Leaving New Jersey was not easy because I lived there all of my life and its all I knew. Sure I went to Florida for vacations but its not the same as living there. I convinced my friend to come with me because he also went to community college with me to become a filmmaker.
It took some hard convincing but he finally decided to come and let me tell you it’s not easy moving across the country. We headed south got our apartment and school was right around the corner because every month was a new enrollment. It was exciting meeting new people with the same passion from different states and cultures.
Since my credits transferred over I got to skip the basic math and english classes and jumped straight into the real stuff. Our first class was photography and I learned so much that it blew my mind of how much science goes into it.
Every month we had two new classes because it was an excelerated program, we got our bachelors degree in 22 months.
Once we had our lighting class I was like a deer in headlights (no pun intended) because we had to understand the power and the names of all these different lights.
I still wasn’t able to grasp everything but I was improving my skills and once we had our cinematography classes I was so excited. Learning about film cameras and framing was so much fun even though we were getting the basics of it from previous classes it helped to understand it better.
I was the cinematographer for a few of our short films and some of these were either assignments or a collaborative class project. Things were going great until we had to get another student loan to cover the next 8 months.
Unfortunately we were almost getting kicked out because our co-signers weren’t qualifying for another loan. All these strange things were popping up as to why we weren’t getting approved. We tried everything possible and it was constantly doors shutting on us.
I was upset and losing hope that my dreams of becoming a filmmaker
Please subscribe to get notified on future posts.
