Rosebud School of the Arts adds film component to curriculum

Film now part of Rosebud instruction

In the 2021-2022 school year, the Rosebud School of the Arts is offering the first of what may become a full selection of film classes

The school had been fortunate to be able to continue to hold classes over the course of the pandemic due to small class sizes, but they expect to return to business as usual for the upcoming school year.

“Yes, we’ve been operating in-person classes, all the while. There’s still a demand for education, and we’re happy to provide it for students that want to come here. It’s been pretty good. We’re looking forward to the fall term starting up, just like we did last fall,” said Aaron Krogman, head of the Theatre Foundations Program for the school.

This year, the school is looking into two classes, one in each semester, as a pilot for a potential larger repertoire of film courses.

“Film is something that lots of theater students are interested in,” said Krogman. “It’s a pretty obvious crossover, storytelling is storytelling. Most of us get introduced to storytelling through this. That was me as a student, I was a student at rosewood school, the arts and really got into theater later in life. I love watching movies and, and that kind of thing early on. So it’s, it’s been on our radar to do film as an organization, for sure. Paul Muir’s been the Education Director for many years, and something he’s had an interest in, so we’re excited to pull the trigger on it. One of the reasons we are theater students, they do a final project at the end of their four year program and fairly often, not the majority, but fairly often, there are students who are interested in doing a short film for their final project. So we’ve had a few examples of students who have actually done film within their degree here. That’s another reason why we want to provide more avenues for that, because students have already embodied the desire to cross over.”

In the Fall semester, one class will be available, which Krogman describes as an introduction to screenwriting, and the second course will instead focus on the production of film and television works in a collaborative manner.

“These these two courses will be really collaborative group based exercises. They’re sort of one offs for now and will be open to our graduates and alumni and some students who are currently in the program as well. And people outside of the RSA experience, too,” said Krogman. 

“Ultimately, we want to work towards a full year, or 12 month film year that our students could take, maybe as a fourth year, but a lot of this is still up in the air,” said Krogman. We’re gonna learn a lot through this, this, these two courses we’re going to do this year. But we want to use that information to sort of build into this vision for a full year of film at Rosebud and the main angle is that we want to appeal to people who are not necessarily wanting to go to a technical school where they learn how to do lighting and how to do camera work and learn all the technical elements because there’s a ton of technical elements in the film world. And we’re more interested in people who are kind of storytellers. They’ve got some experience in storytelling in its various formats and are curious about exploring screen based work.”

While they are not currently offering enrollment for the two classes, there’s been interest from students and alumni, said Krogman, and they expect to have a full class for this pilot programming.

“It’s been my experience that the idea for students in the film world is that they’ve kind of become a one stop shop, they learn all of the technical things,” said Krogman. “They get some gear, and then they start doing projects. They’re mostly like promotional projects that they end up doing for people. And while I think all that stuff’s pretty cool, so many people that I know, in that boat, always want to do stuff like passion projects, they want to get into, you know, more narrative types of storytelling. And this program is kind of seeking to just be a direct line to that kind of work for people.”

Film now part of Rosebud instruction

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