Here’s a formula for making a lot of quick cash: open a New York Film School. All you need to do is give your school a name with the word “New York” in it, such as ***Academy or New York University. Buy a couple of crappy digital cameras, some boom poles, and then start advertising to young people who don’t know any better.

Most people looking for “New York Film School” on the internet are probably thinking of the New York Film Academy. These guys are brilliant marketers. They saw that students at NYU Film School were shelling out $30,000 to make silly little films and thought “We could make a lot of money off this.”

The Only Good Thing About a New York Film School Is New York City

New York Film Academy and NYU capitalize on the splendor and excitement of New York City. It’s such a great place to be, people come from all over the world to visit. So setting up a school in the middle of Manhattan automatically makes people excited about going.

But at the end of the day, everyone in the industry knows that these any New York film school is a joke. The cameras are banged up and passed around between hundreds of other students. Courses at NYU cost $42,000 a year. Workshops at New York Film Academy can cost $8,000 for a few weeks to $18,000 a semester. And what are students learning at a New York Film School?

The same things most people learn in their high school’s AV class. How to do little film exercises and make short videos, using video cameras that could be rented for only a few hundreds dollars a day or even purchased for much less than the classes.

People in the industry refer to New York Film Schools as “chop shops” or “diploma mills”. A bunch of starry eyed students are herded up and handed out some cheap equipment, taught some basic filmmaking nonsense. They get excited that they are in a big city shooting little movies. At the end of the day these poor suckers have just paid $30,000 to hold a boom pole. Something that smarter people, people with real careers in the film business, do for free without paying any tuition at all.

Don’t Be Suckered By a New York Film School

Before wasting your time and money on a New York Film School, check out this article on how to reproduce a $42,000 student film for just a few hundreds bucks. You can easily and inexpensively re-create the basic and ridiculously simple exercises that they have you do at either of these New York Film Schools.

And if you want some real world, no bullshit advice on what to do instead of becoming a joke by attending an expensive New York Film School, then make sure to check out Film School Secrets.