Student review [#98937] for Film Production
at Catalyst – Institute for Creative Arts and Technology

It’s a playground – not a school. If you want good quality education – don’t come here for that.
For a community maybe. For practical experience. But the quality of education and management are pretty poor…

I signed up for a Bachelor Degree in Film first and then switched to 1 year program because I realised that it is not worth it.

The structure of the program is very intense and quite sporadic. And not in the good way. 90% of the people who come here have zero experience, which is normal of course. But the teachers barely teach you the basics and then just throw you into the production (with very stressful deadlines) to see if you can swim. Almost no good work comes out of the first year of course – first of all because they just want you to make your own mistakes to learn from them instead of giving you good education.
Second of all 90% of the students are rich kids that don’t want to work – they just want to “make art”. And the teachers indulge that.

But the film industry doesn’t work like that. Film is discipline, work, professional standards, vision.

I would say it’s a playground. Not a school.
Now about the lessons and teachers. The good thing is that they invite some really cool industry professionals to teach on a freelance basis. I enjoyed some classes a lot when an established director or scriptwriter led the lessons. On the other hand, majority of the contracted stuff seem underqualified or disengaged…

The cinematography taught in the first year is just shallow. I don’t think I learned anything from those classes. Later on, the same teacher gives us feedback and advice on our projects, and I’m sorry, but this is just not the person I want to hear feedback from. He imagines he’s an amazing mentor while making factual mistakes and not being able to get his thoughts straight. And then he gives us feedback on our final projects.

And our adviser is literally just not trained for this job, as she admitted herself. Why do they put a person without training in such an important position?

She made my year so stressful. First of all, when she’s supposed to guide and support us throughout our productions, she just reads the academic guidelines out loud. Where she’s supposed to help resolve a problem or conflict (which happens a lot in production), she just avoids it and sugarcoats everything until it blows up. She literally humiliated me at the screening of my first-ever short film. And you can’t do anything about it. You can’t go up the chain of command because everyone just says, “Talk to your adviser.”

So you’re just stuck.

There are two other advisers who are better, so if you’re going to this program, pray that you get lucky.

On the positive side – the community. Catalyst brings very different people together, and I’ve met some truly great people here.

It’s up to you in the end.