By Niya Diamo
If you’re looking to get into film and start writing about it, what kind of specialty would you go for? Journalism or film studies? Would any of those give you exactly what you need?
And what if you are a good writer and a movie buff and you know anything and everything about film, but you have no formal training neither in writing, nor in the specifics of film making, could you make a career?
Specialists say if you want to be a film journalist, you don’t need any formal training, you just need practice. You have to be passionate about film and know a lot about the industry and not only “post-Scorsese”, as they put it. But is film journalism only writing reviews and commenting on film, rather than something more important, as game journalism has turned out to be, influencing trends by criticising bad products? We can all write our movie blogs and comment on what we’ve seen in the cinema last week, but can we REALLY make a living like that or do we need to be “more professional”?
Writer, researcher and film critic John Berra, CUEAFS’s special guest speaker this week, is a proof that a professional film journalist and critic doesn’t necessarily need to be a trained journalist. Yet, however, John holds a PhD in media from Sheffield University.
A journalism course might get you nowhere near what you are passionate about, but a media or film course would certainly be useful as to the means you use in interpreting and analysing film when critiquing. Nobody can make a career of “it sucked” or “it was amazing” comments, but if you can cleverly analyse it, you don’t need journalistic training. And, if you can write well, just start submitting your pieces. You know what they say – practice makes perfect.Labels: cueafs |
