What Makes Colorado Film Academy Different?

FIRST – Our Tuition Prices are more affordable than any other major film school providing even slightly comparable quality of education. You don’t have to scroll the fine print or call an admissions advisor to find out how much it really costs. And all the equipment and technical production materials are included in the tuition cost rather than being tacked on as sneaky “additional costs.” The only thing which is not included is lodging and your meals, although on many production days even your meals are provided.

Intro. Teaser 1 hour to 4 hour workshops ($45 to $95)
Weekend (Two Day) Super Intensive Workshops ($395)
Full Week (Seven Day) Super-Intensive Workshops ($795)
12 Week Full Immersion Studies Program ($3,495)
Full Year (12 Month) Full Immersion Studies Program ($14,995

SECOND - We are the only film school in the world that teaches using the Lakish Method of Super-Intensive Immersion Film Studies in a True Professional Apprenticeship context, shooting actual independent feature films using industry standard equipment.

At Colorado Film Academy all 12 Week and Full Year students will learn using Arriflex 35mm cameras and Kodak celluloid filmstock as well as ARRI, RED, Sony, Fuji and Black Magic Digital Production Systems. You wont just learn one professional production flow and system. You will learn all six systems and what are the differences between them.

We are a TRUE FILM SCHOOL!! What does that mean? Most production training programs only teach modern “digital” camera and editing systems. We begin our 12 week and one year studies programs deep in the context of historical film production shooting real celluloid negative filmstock and having negatives processed and one-light work prints struck at the same labs where Nolan, Spielberg, Tarintino, Scorsese, Anderson, Eggers, Guadagnino, Scott and Lanthimos have their filmstock processed.

YES THIS COSTS OUR SCHOOL ROUGHLY 100 TIMES THE COST OF SHOOTING ONLY ON DIGITAL. But that is the difference between our film school and all the others.

Does this mean our “TRUE” film studies program costs 100 times as much as the digital only programs? No! How is this possible?

Well, we don’t operate a multi-million dollar campus or have a swarm of marketing agencies, ad firms and six figure salary drawing professors on our payroll. We spend your tuition money that we get from you actually in providing an education to you rather than funneling nearly all of it into the institutional overhead. We are a lean, mean production machine and we will teach you how to become one yourself.

Is it a hard core education? Absolutely!!

The world already has plenty of traditional digital production training programs. We don’t want to be just like everyone else. We want to provide the most “ELITE” but yet still “AFFORDABLE” True-Film education anywhere on planet Earth.

Come and join us if your personality meets our highly selective criteria for full time enrollment.

Not every student who applies will be accepted. But that is why we have a strict and mandatory requirement for you to try out a TWO DAY or ONE WEEK “INTENSIVE’ workshop prior to even applying to one of our long term programs.

Yes, we are exclusive and we want to test you out and see how you handle yourself under pressure. But even more important, we want you to test us out. Do you really want to spend 12 weeks or a year of your life in a hard-core cinema training environment where you live work and breathe cinema production? Not everyone is cut out for that level of commitment.

At Colorado Film Academy everyone works at least a minimum of the standard 72 hour regular (non-overtime) production week which is expected of all professional Union/Guild “Hollywood Style” productions. If you can’t handle that then you should probably pick a different line of work.

Yeah, for those of us who can handle the heat in the kitchen, filmmaking is the most engaging and collaborative multi-faceted occupation on earth. Yes, there are breaks to re-charge in between productions. But when it is time for Principal Photography we get the job done no matter the obstacles.

For most of us we consider Filmmaking to be the greatest profession on earth, (at least the greatest for us), and it is truly one of those jobs like being an astronaut, a professional athlete or a front line soldier, where it just becomes your entire reality.

After a while you can’t imagine yourself living any other lifestyle. So during production and because we are training you to do “above-the-line” jobs, you will likely find that you are being creative even more than 72 hours per week most weeks.

Why learn to shoot “old fashioned celluloid film when that costs 100 times as much?

Because it forces you to have creative discipline. When you are putting a hundred dollar bill through the camera every minute there is no reckless haphazard carelessness like there can be even when you are filling up terabyte hard drives with Uncompressed 444 ARRI Raw files.

We want our students to have that traditional education skill set which is only available through the experience of old school methods of REAL film production utilizing the traditions of technical discipline going back over 100 years. Once you learn that level of creative discipline, Yeah go and apply those skills to digital production for 1/100th the cost. We are completely in favor of that. Its not either/or. Its both!

At Colorado Film Academy if you possess an iphone and a Walmart laptop you will know how to discipline yourself and organize your cast and crew to apply your skills to make a film that looks like something made for 20 million dollars back in the year 2000. Or you will know how to get the most out of a rental Arri Alexa LF package or an IMAX certified RED camera that rents for $3500 per day, because you will already have the experience of having worked with that very same gear.

You will have the skills necessary to make any kind of film at any budget level. That is the creative discipline which it is our objective to convey to you through our educational process.

And just in case Christopher Nolan ever posts a Camera Department job opening (not likely because those folks all work their way up the ranks through a very similar apprenticeship training system similar to our own), but if that were ever to happen, you might like to be one of the few people in the world under the age of 50 who actually know how to shoot real celluloid film stock. Put that feather in you bonnet!

Unless there is another program somewhere that we haven’t been made aware of (not likely), our dedication to real Celluloid film production combined with our emphasis on Narrative Feature Filmmaking (rather than only on short student films), means that Colorado Film Academy is actually the world’s only TRUE FILM SCHOOL in which our students learn both the skills of shooting traditional 35mm film stock and also working on real narrative feature productions from concept through development, pre-production, principal and second unit shooting on through the post production pipeline all the way to distribution.

Nearly every other “production studies” program in the world should really just call themselves a Videography School rather than a “Film School” because most of the actual “film studies” were eliminated by budget cuts 20 years ago as institutions opted for the much more affordable option of only offering and teaching “Video Studies” rather than actual “Film Studies.”