This is my final post to my Mastery Journal blog. Over the course of this program, I have been required and encouraged to use this platform to express myself and get myself out there in the form of a blog. I personally believe that this is not the appropriate platform for this, and I don’t think I am alone in that thinking as it has been expressed by my fellow students and even some of my instructors. Regardless of my personal opinion, I have been routinely required to post here on this blog, usually to reflect on my time in a class or on my “journey so far” in the program and I have done so well I believe. So, in this final post, I will reflect on not just my time in this program, but on this journal as well to wrap up this year.
First, I am going to address my current, and final, class in my MFA program: Business of Film. At the start of this class, I was given a brief refresh on things I had already learned in my Bachelor program. Beyond that I got a very deep look at how decisions are made in the film industry, and that boiled down to the simple lesson: What makes a film successful? Obviously, people outside the industry believe if a movie is solidly made and makes sense story-wise it’s a success. But for those of us who make movies, it is important to remember that if a movie doesn’t make money it clearly didn’t do well. That thinking is what this class was really about, how to handle the business part of your film after you’ve made it. Most of us in film school forget that part but it is equally important, if not more important, as the process to make the movie. I really took to heart the lessons on distribution and branding, as those really apply to my career goal as a director.
Now about this blog, I feel as though a better platform would’ve been a YouTube portfolio or video blog profile. While I appreciate the practice of sitting down and reflecting on what we learned, I feel like it could’ve been better suited by using our industry medium. Overall, I have taken the experience of reflection very well and think it is a practice I will endeavor to implement in the future.
My inspirational thought comes from one of my personal inspirations in the film industry, Steven Spielberg:
“I don’t dream at night; I dream during the day. I dream for a living.” – Steven Spielberg
Zach Rudden Filmmaker 