Barbara Schock
As students and faculty continue to adapt to remote learning, Tisch Grad Film Chair Barbara Schock reflects on how her program has responded to the challenges presented by quarantine and how artists can emerge from this crisis with renewed perspective.
How has the Graduate Film community adapted to remote learning?
Some disciplines have adapted more easily than others, but we’re learning and improving daily. While some students were understandably hesitant to embrace the change, most have adjusted and recognize that this kind of instruction has its own particular value—a more direct, perhaps even a more personal value. A month into remote learning, I find it remarkable how quickly everyone has mentally shifted to this new reality. Necessity is the mother of adaptation. We are in a crisis that will be written about in history books for generations. As a culture, we are joined together by our efforts to save lives, and the only means within our power is to practice social distancing, and by every measure it is working. Even in the midst of tragedy and loss, online learning is saving lives.
While remote teaching will never replace the collegiality and camaraderie of in-person teaching, I believe much would be lost if we couldn’t hold classes now. We’d finished three quarters of the school year before the pandemic hit us, and on a practical level, it’s important that students can complete their courses so everyone can start fresh in the fall. On an emotional and artistic level, I also think online learning is providing structure, and giving us a purpose and meaning during this time of uncertainty.
What is happening with production?
We are, famously, a physical production program. But all production has been paused, and it’s frustrating not knowing when we can resume. What is most imperative is that we are all safe in our homes. While professional as well as student production is on hold, we’ve still found ways to create. For example, our first year students are making 36 individual 5-minute iPhone films about their experiences sheltering at home for an assignment called ‘The Private Month,’ which we plan to edit into a longer, collective film experience. Some of the early efforts are remarkable. We hope one day to share this project with the world as a record of this extraordinary time.
What has inspired you during this pivot?
Our students’ desire to keep learning inspires me. Students are being proactive and creative. They've formed Zoom writing groups, which I think will be one of the best byproducts of this experience, and have told me they appreciate the engagement and routine their classes provide.
Faculty have found inventive ways to adapt their curriculums. Our sound design teacher Ryan Billia taught students to do Foley at home with a simple recorder on a camera tripod. He showed them how to cue up everything they wanted in a scene; play back from Avid, calling out a timecode marker and snapping their fingers for a sync point; and then act out whatever was needed. He showed them coffee mug grabs, clothing rustling, hand grabs, etc. After importing the audio back, they can hear the timecode and finger snap to sync audio! The joy of making work, the heart of our program, continues.
I’m also inspired by how closely knit our community has remained. Our students are keeping tabs on one another to make sure everyone is managing through these hard days. This crisis has further strengthened the bonds we have with one another.
Have you found any silver linings in this temporary situation?
Several teachers have commented on how Zoom has given voice to the quieter students. Zoom places students in the same frame and equidistant to one another, and more reticent students are more willing to participate.
We’ve managed to bring in remarkable guests because people in our industry are available, and have been very generous. Darren Aronofsky, for instance, spent an inspiring couple of hours with our students online. The wisdom and generosity of an artist whose work speaks to the times in which we find ourselves was a gift much appreciated by the students, and it will likely have a lasting and formative influence on their own work and experience. The amazing Chloe Zhao, an alumna of our department, was so inspiring to the students. She said something very important—essentially, that artists will emerge from this crisis with a deeper perspective.
The Zoom platform is conducive to guest speakers, much better than other online platforms we’ve used in the past. Students can be addressed by name when a guest answers a question, and the back and forth between guest and student is personal and focused. We will definitely continue to bring in guests via Zoom when we’re back in the classroom.
Do you have any advice on how a filmmaker can best make use of this pause in global film production?
Someone wrote on Twitter: “I finished Netflix.” Audiences are looking for new stories. Making a film is a shifting sequence of thinking, imagining, putting pen to paper, imagining some more—all before picking up a camera on set. This is, in some ways, an ideal time to imagine, and even begin to construct, the films and series of the future.
How has the pandemic affected the film industry?
The motion picture industry has been turned on its ear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Worldwide, movie theaters and film and television productions have been shut down. On the positive side, streaming platforms have seen a huge boost in viewership. I read that 34 million people in the U.S. watched Netflix’s TIGER KING in its first 10 days of release. The theatrical arm of the movie business, already struggling before the coronavirus, is probably going to have difficulty regaining ground. But we hope, and believe, it can find new ways to survive in a post-virus world.
Our Associate Chair and producing professor, Donna Gigliotti, says streamers will continue their dominance in film and television production. They will need to make up for time lost to production shutdowns. In other words, they’ll need to make more series and films. This opens up huge possibilities for talented Tisch students. Original film and television projects are crucial to the streaming services, which need to appeal to audiences of all ages and ethnicities in nearly every part of the world. Opportunities abound for anyone who wants to make authentic, entertaining, engaging films or television shows, and our talented students are uniquely positioned to connect with this global audience.
How is Grad Film assisting its students in this challenging time?
The Area Heads and I have been meeting with classes and are responding directly to students’ issues. We’re including Class Reps in making decisions about how to adjust the curriculum going forward, and working to make sure traditional offerings are not lost.
We are fortunate to work and study at an amazing school. We have sensitive and committed leadership from the top down at Tisch, from Dean Allyson Green to all our faculty and staff, as well as at NYU broadly. I personally have never felt so much school unity—and even enthusiasm.
I look forward to working with everyone to find the best way forward when the pandemic ends. And it will end, and we will make movies together again.
How is New York doing, really?
New York is the epicenter of this world health crisis. We all have family and friends, colleagues and classmates, who have been affected. There are hopeful signs that the spread of the virus is slowing due to the measures we are taking.
To anyone who lives here, New York feels smaller than it is. This city has navigated crises of great magnitude, and New Yorkers always come together. We’re friendly and we know how to lean on, and lend a hand to, one another. This is so apparent in our health care workers, who are risking their lives daily but say they have never worked so well together. Every night at 7:00 pm, all over the five boroughs, New Yorkers lean out their windows and balconies and cheer, make noise with musical instruments, pots and pans, to applaud those brave health care workers and essential employees who keep our city functioning. And people have been waving to one another, too, a little check-in to say hello—and everyone comes out— family, dogs, everyone. This is very moving, every day.
Final thoughts?
Our newly admitted class includes students from China, Italy, and Spain. We are bound together now by our stories of COVID-19. I’m proud of how our school and community are navigating this crisis. We’re all doing our very best in dire circumstances. Out of this experience, which is both intensely shared and intensely private, powerful art will emerge. We look forward to providing the place and means to make that happen.
Recently in the Financial Times, the Indian author Arundhati Roy wrote: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
I embrace the idea that this pandemic will be a portal to a new beginning for all of us.
Barbara Schock, Chair
Graduate Film Program
Tisch School of the Arts
New York University