"You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!" ~ Spielberg

March 27, 2014 6:58 AM

Filmmaker IQ offers an extensive variety of free online courses, articles and tutorial videos for aspiring filmmakers. Their image gallery is also fun to browse through.

On Youtube and Vimeo. Select promotional shots and behind-the-scenes images from film and tv can also be seen on their facebook page.

Previously on MeFi: Animated GIFs for Adults

posted by zarq (8 comments total)

The site's interface is a little weird, and I believe it may be optimized to work on a touchscreen. If like me you're working on a computer with just a keyboard and mouse:

The site is divided into three columns but there's only one scrollbar. You'll need to click somewhere in a specific column first before the scrollbar will work on it. To set focus, in other words.

For the image gallery, which has many images in close proximity, click on one of the white borders (on firefox, this meant moving my mouse until its icon turned from a hand into an arrow, then clicking once) and you'll be able to see scroll back and forth.
posted by zarq at 7:03 AM on March 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ahhh film school lessons...

I'm reminded of a very prestigious and competitive film school in France, the FEMIS - the exam to get in is insanely hard, and they only accept brilliant, artistic minded candidates with both a passion and encyclopaedic knowledge of movies.

Once you're in, the best of these top candidates only get to be in the 'Director' track - the others are relegated to less prestigious tracks (technical, producing,..). Once you're in, you get funding to do short movies, great technical teams, the best teachers the country has to offer, etc...

And yet, so far, in years and years of existence of this prestigious institution, only one person from this school has ever become a film director...
posted by Riton at 7:08 AM on March 27, 2014

...THANK YOU ZARQ.
posted by The Whelk at 7:09 AM on March 27, 2014

Louis Malle went to La Femis, and he's s hardly the only graduate who ever directed.
This site looks more like an amalgamated collection than original content.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:14 AM on March 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Louis Malle went to La Femis, and he's s hardly the only graduate who ever directed.
This site looks more like an amalgamated collection than original content.

just checked this and it's 100% true - a ton of students actually went on to direct - my source was a cahiers du cinema article which I probably misread. sorry for the derail / mistake

I like the filmmaker site a lot though - some really interesting things on there!
posted by Riton at 7:18 AM on March 27, 2014

This is very good! I shared with a few colleagues who haven't done much video work to help them feel less overwhelmed. For me, there are some deeper lessons that look as though they will be beneficial.

Thanks zarq!
posted by Mister_A at 8:16 AM on March 27, 2014

Their history of aspect ratios video (which was previously linked on the Blue) is awesome.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:12 AM on March 28, 2014

Love this site. The History of Trailers on is pretty cool.
posted by octothorpe at 4:41 AM on March 31, 2014