We all knew how to prepare ourselves for a typical IU film class, but none of us knew how to prepare for a Czech FAMU class.
Excited for the unknown, we hopped onto the transit and made haste to class. We navigated through the winding city on a hot, crowded public tram full of all kinds of peoples and languages, and jumped from stop to stop until we saw the green, beacon-like letters of “Studio FAMU.”
We had three classes that day: Preproduction, Directing and Cinematography. The first class was taught by IU’s own Susan Kelly, and it functioned as a writers’ room dedicated to our four upcoming scripts. We all read the scripts as a class and discussed our feelings and thoughts on each story in a creative, constructive atmosphere. Throughout the course of creative debates, periodically interrupted by brief stints of comic relief, our group left with four complete scripts ready to be shot.
After this, we had our Directing class taught by our Czech professor, Bara. She was a stern, tough woman whose love for film inspired us even more. She screened short films and discussed the production and story elements of each movie. Then together we elaborated as to how we can use said elements in our own stories. As Bara dove into film theory, we wrote as fast as we could, trying our hardest to capture each term and definition.
After each class, we exited the main doors and collectively take a deep sigh of relief, wide-eyed from the intense experience, yet beyond grateful for the eye-opening ideas and concepts that we traveled across the world to hear.
Our last class, Cinematography, was taught by Micheal. He was a small Czech man with a heavy accent, and his one-of-a-kind personality and unique sense of humor quickly won us over. He is an expert in the field with decades of filmmaking under his belt. His lectures are highly technical and detailed-oriented. He threw in Czech phrases after every other sentence, and soon after class, we started to practice our own Micheal impressions of his signature Czech catchphrases.
We were all accustomed to studying at IU, but the FAMU classes were nothing like we expected. We were pushed and challenged, frustrated and tense, but we left each class feeling stronger in our own filmmaking skills, motivated to create our own cinematic works of art. We flew across the world to hear these words, and after each class, we realized that our journey here was entirely worth it.
