The Film Academy
Three tracks, written for people who intend to make films rather than talk about them. Studio curriculum is taught in-house. The OpenCourseWare shelf at the bottom is taught elsewhere and linked at the source.
v9.0.0 · Ecosystem
Track A — Film History
Start with what the medium already decided, and why.
The Golden Age of Hollywood: 1930–1948
FoundationThe studio system at full pressure: contract players, the Production Code, and the chiaroscuro that émigré cinematographers carried out of Berlin.
Documentary and the Truth Claim
CoreVertov, cinéma vérité and the modern fly-on-the-wall. Where documentary authority comes from, and the specific edits that break it.
World Cinema After the War
CoreItalian neorealism, the French New Wave and the Japanese golden age — three answers to one question: what should a camera do after the war?
New Hollywood and the Blockbuster: 1967–1985
CoreHow Easy Rider cracked the old studios open, and how Jaws rebuilt them around the opening weekend. Auteur freedom, then the mathematics of the wide release.
The Silent Era: 1895–1929
FoundationMéliès' trick films through Gance's Napoléon. How a grammar of close-ups, iris shots and tinted frames was invented before anyone could record sound — and why those choices still read as emotion.
Track B — Production & Directing
The craft decisions that survive the cutting room.
Editing: Rhythm and Continuity
CoreMatch cuts, reaction timing and the Kuleshov effect — where continuity is a contract with the audience, and when breaking it is the point.
Directing Actors
CoreAdjustments, verbs and coverage. Getting a performance that cuts together without ever asking for an emotion.
Film Finance and Distribution
AdvancedRecoupment waterfalls, minimum guarantees, presales, and the exact order in which money returns to each investor.
Screenwriting Structure
FoundationScene function over formula: what a scene owes the one before it, and how sequence design carries a feature without leaning on three-act scaffolding.
Fundamentals of Cinematography
FoundationFocal length, t-stops, key-to-fill ratios and the practical arithmetic of exposing a night interior. Shot by shot, with the meter readings to match.
Track C — Studio Operations
The paperwork and money that let a film exist at all.
Post Delivery and Compliance
AdvancedDCP and IMF packaging, streamer specifications and the QC pass that stops a release dead.
Festival Strategy and Markets
CorePremiere rules, EFM and AFM, and how a sales agent actually sells a finished film to a territory.
Production Legal and Chain of Title
AdvancedOptions, clearances, E&O insurance and the paper trail a distributor will not close without.
Talent Management
CorePackaging, representation and deal memos — how attachments move a project from maybe to financed.
The Business of Film
CoreSingle-purpose LLCs, tax incentives, completion bonds and the paperwork that makes a production bankable in the first place.
OpenCourseWare
University courses published free by MIT and Harvard. We link to them; we do not teach them. Every link opens the original course page.
The Film Experience
MIT's foundational film course: how narrative, image and sound work on an audience, taught through a century of canonical features.
The City in Film
How cinema has pictured the city — as setting, as character, and as an argument about who a city is for.
Philosophy of Film
What film is, what it does to time and reality, and why the medium provoked its own branch of aesthetics.
Studies in Film
Close reading of individual films, with an emphasis on how meaning is built shot by shot rather than carried by plot.
French Film Classics
A survey of French cinema's canonical works, from poetic realism through the New Wave.
Shakespeare, Film and Media
How Shakespeare’s plays have been reworked for screen and media, and what adaptation reveals about both the play and the medium.
CopyrightX
Harvard Law School's free copyright course — the rights, licences and fair-use reasoning a film has to clear before it can be distributed.
