Last Updated 4 weeks ago
For years, I kept seeing the same patterns repeat.
The same weak habits on student sets.
The same confusion about how crews actually work.
The same obsession with gear instead of judgment.
The same gap between what students thought would matter and what actually matters once the work becomes real.
That gap is bigger than most people realize.
Film school can help. I’m not anti-film school. But a lot of students are being prepared for the wrong things. They learn how to complete assignments, survive critiques, and talk about movies. What they often do not learn clearly enough is how to build repeatable habits, how to protect a shoot day, how to behave in a way that builds trust, how to make better technical decisions under pressure, and how to stop making the same avoidable mistakes over and over.
That is why I wrote this book.
101 Lessons I Learned Teaching at a Film School is a blunt, practical guide for film students, recent graduates, and early-career filmmakers who want to get better faster and waste less time doing it.
This is not a book about vague inspiration or film-school mythology. It is about practical corrections.
It is about the patterns that quietly slow people down:
bad process, weak communication, sloppy prep, avoidable sound problems, weak set behavior, unrealistic expectations, unclear direction, inconsistent craft, and portfolios that show taste but not competence.
The lessons are short on purpose. I didn’t want to write a book full of long theory chapters that make people feel smart for an afternoon and change nothing the next day. I wanted something tighter, more direct, and more useful. Something people could actually apply on their next project.
Here’s a sample from the book:
1. School rewards completion. The industry rewards competence
Truth: Finishing gets grades. Competence gets hired.
Common issue: Students treat assignments like they “don’t count.”
Why this matters
In school, you can get through an assignment with a weak plan, messy communication, and a
half-baked finish as long as you hand something in. In the industry, “handing something in”
isn’t the win. The win is delivering something that works under constraints, repeatedly, without
drama. Competence looks like: the day ran, the footage cuts, the sound is usable, the team isn’t
pissed, and you can do it again next week.
If you train on “completion,” you develop the wrong reflexes. You normalize sloppy prep,
last-minute scrambling, and patching problems later. Those are exactly the habits that make
you expensive to hire and stressful to manage.
What it looks like in real life
A student hands in a short film that’s “done,” but the dialogue is inconsistent, the coverage
doesn’t match, the continuity is shaky, and the editor is forced to invent solutions. In school,
the project passes. On a set, the same pattern leads to overtime, reshoots, angry department
heads, and a client who loses trust quickly.
Competence isn’t magic. It’s boring fundamentals under pressure: decisions made early, a realistic plan, controlled execution, and clean delivery.
How to fix it
Stop treating assignments like “practice that doesn’t matter.” They are practice, but practice
is where habits form. You need to build the habit of delivering something clean, not just “finished.”
Do this next:
Before you start any project, define what “done” means in writing (picture locked, intelligible
dialogue, credits, export).
Build a simple checklist that you can use to track your progress.
Reduce the scope until you can execute cleanly.
Finish early enough to do one improvement pass instead of exporting at the last second.
After delivery, write down the top two failures and build a rule to prevent them next time.
Reality check: Can you deliver 3 projects in a row on time with no missing pieces (picture
locked, usable dialogue, credits, export) and no “we’ll fix it later” promises?
That is the tone of the whole book.
If you are a film student, an aspiring filmmaker, or someone early in your career trying to get your work and your habits to a more professional level, I wrote this for you.
You can check out the book here: 101 Lessons I Learned Teaching at a Film School
If you’ve followed HowToFilmSchool for a while, you’ll probably recognize a lot of the themes. This book pulls those lessons into one place, sharpens them, and makes them easier to apply.
I’m proud of it.
More importantly, I think it will actually help people.
