• New York City Campus: Age Groups 14-16 & 16-18, Sessions Three & Four Only
• Vermont Campus: Age Groups 13-16 & 16-18, Session One Only
• High School Filmmakers: Earn College Credit for our Three-Week Advanced Filmmaking Intensives

OVERVIEW
SOCAPA's Advanced Filmmaking Program is geared towards students with prior film or video experience. The program is competitive and requires applicants to submit at least one completed film or video project and a short film treatment (story idea) for review during our selection process.

Students accepted into the Advanced Program will focus on making two longer, more polished films that they can afterwards submit to agents and film festivals world-wide. In addition to advanced classes in directing, cinematography, sound, and digital editing, a strong emphasis will be placed on workshopping story ideas and scripts in writing class and working with actors in directing class. Students will receive extensive one-on-one advisements from our seasoned staff of instructor/filmmakers – all of whom have experience at festivals and with agents.

THREE-WEEK ADVANCED CURRICULUM:
Film Festivals and agents like short films to be just that - short. Festivals, which like to showcase as much talent as possible, prefer shorter films because they can program more of them into a given time slot, thus exposing their audiences to more stories by more filmmakers. Agents like shorter films because they can watch more of them in a given day and thus expose themselves to more talent per second than by watching longer films. Agents would even prefer two good eight-minute films by the same director than one good twenty-minute film because in two separate films, a director can show a broader range of styles.

Thus, it is our steadfast belief that our students should keep their films under ten minutes in length. The idea is this: if you can show that you can write creatively, cover scenes visually, and elicit strong performances from actors in an eight-minute short film, then you can do it in a twenty-minute film or even a feature-length film. Short films are more economical to make and are more likely to be watched by agents, festival programmers and even your friends and family.

Advanced Filmmaking Students make two 6- to 8-minute films in the three-week program.

4) The Hitchcock Film: Alfred Hitchcock was a master of visual storytelling. He would often convey information using a single silent shot that it would take a lesser filmmaker pages and pages of cumbersome dialogue to get across. In this film, students are encouraged to take a visual approach to telling their stories. Dialogue should be used sparsely, if at all. Instead, we urge students to use composition, camera movement, shot selection, blocking, lighting, color and nonsynchronous sound to convey meaning.

5) The Kazan Film: Co-founder of the famous Actor’s Studio, the breeding ground for "The Method", Elia Kazan is considered one of the great actor’s directors. Twenty-one of his actors have been nominated for Academy Awards and nine have won. Under his guidance, actors like Natalie Wood and Carol Sue Baker soared to levels of performance that they could not match before or after. In this culmination film, we challenge our Advanced Students to elicit the best and most truthful performances they can from their cast without losing sight of all they have learned about visual storytelling.