1. Bureaucracy
Your school may be more interested in your tuition than your education - like the film industry, school is a business, and their job is to keep you enrolled. You have to deal with the admissions office, financial aid office, academic advising, and at four-year colleges, General Education requirements like math and science and history. Not everything is about making movies, and you could spend a great deal of time trying to fight your way through the system just to learn something.
2. Mediocrity
Not every film student is a cinematic genius. Film being a collaborative process, you will need other people to help you realize your vision, and not everyone knows what they’re doing. Some people go to film school thinking all they have to do is graduate to become the next Spielberg or Scorsese, and they all think they can make your film better than you can. It’s up to you to learn who is reliable, who will work hard, and who has the passion to create good work through collaboration.
3. Hollywoodism
Some schools design their curriculum around the belief that the only way to succeed as a filmmaker is to enter the mainstream film industry. They forget about independents, experimental film, personal storytelling...you decide your own definition of success. If your goal is to direct a 200 million dollar epic, there are paths to this achievement - and if your goal is to work outside the mainstream, the school may not have resources to guide you. Either way, it’s up to you to determine your own path.
4. Criticism
Whatever your level of skill or experience, some of your work will be bad. Even your best work will fail to impress somebody. Use feedback to make your work better, not to make more people appreciate it. Learning what advice to ignore, and which notes to apply, is a process filled with mistakes and poor results - but as long as you never take anything personally, you’ll be fine. It isn’t about you; it’s about the work.
5. Technical Difficulties
A film school will provide you with access to all sorts of equipment: cameras, lights, editing tools, sound components, computers, projectors, possibly even a telecine machine - a lot of this equipment will not work properly. Even at the best schools with the newest equipment, things are broken, mishandled, mislabeled, misused...and there’s never time or money to repair them. This is, however, good training for the industry - you have to work with what you’ve got, and it’s always the last guy who broke it.
Still want to go to film school? Good, because it’s definitely worth it. You meet a lot of talented and interesting people. You make connections with those you’ll be working alongside once you graduate. You learn the techniques behind taking ideas from your head to put them on paper and on screen. You learn the equipment, the jargon, the lies and the truth of the film world. Most importantly, you get an education that matters to you - and any goal achieved is therefore also worth the obstacles.
