Today, we are relaunching No Film School as the leading worldwide community of filmmakers, video producers, and independent creatives. The new No Film School is where filmmakers can learn from each other — “no film school” required.
I originally launched this site as my personal blog. 70 million pageviews later, it can be so much more. So the new No Film School is no longer “just” a blog, but a full-fledged community site.
This relaunch is also a restatement of why I started this site in the first place. Why is it called "no film school?” Because not everyone can go to film school. We believe filmmakers around the world should have access to ongoing film education and opportunities — not just those who live near, or can afford, film school. Thus, with this new site we strive to create the kind of global community that can help filmmakers, video producers, and creatives learn from each other. That’s why our focus is on building the best community we can. We hope you’ll join us.
Quick Start
Hit the Login button at the top right and fill out your profile. Claim your URL now!
Review our new Community Guidelines.
Check out our topics — over 4,000 articles are now categorized for whatever field in film you’re interested in.
Browse the discussions, and ask and answer questions.
Site Tour
Profiles
Everyone gets a profile page to call home now. You can prominently share a video/reel of yours, add links to your own sites and social networks, enter your bio, and track your latest activity on the site. We are now a real names site. “NFS Score” is something we’re launching in beta — see our Community Guidelines for more details on the point system.
Homepage
We’re still doing some work on the new homepage to give us several different takes on the featured content stage. We’ll have a few different ways to slice the stage to keep everything fresh, and then further down is the reverse-chronological blog order everyone is familiar with, with posts from the boards right there on the homepage. This is a page we’ll iterate on in the months and years to come to give us more ways to shuffle the content (two current examples: “In Case You Missed It” at the bottom, and a featured story in the header).
Search
For years, our search and archives were broken; now we have a global search bar that brings in all the new content types and over 4,000 articles from the archives, and starts showing results as soon as you start typing. We still have some work to do on the search results pages — for now the key is to hit “Enter” to see all results, and then use the “View All” link next to the content type you’re looking for.
Topics
Everything is now sorted into organized Topics. The organizing principle of the new site is that, instead of creating an unmanageable number of sub-forums, we have broader categories (e.g. “Editing & Post-Production”) and then within each of those we use tags to offer more granular exploration (e.g. “Premiere Pro”). These topics and tags apply not only to articles, but also to discussions and questions, and you can filter through anything with them. Note we have over 5,000 tags to sort through from the old site, so give us a bit of time to get those straightened out!
Articles
Finally, most people think the front door of a website is the homepage, but for most visitors it’s really the article page. Our new article page is clean, focused, and puts the focus on the text and videos — there isn’t even a sidebar to distract you from the content itself. Scroll all the way down to the threaded comments and you’ll find our custom “you might like” engine surfaces articles.
Thanks
I’d like to thank J, David, Cassidy, Molly, and Matthew at Athletics for their brilliant design work, as well as Jason and Rich at Enabled for their exceptional development of the site. I started searching for designers nearly two years ago, so this was a long road — but it was worth the search in order to find the right collaborators (as any filmmaker knows). I could not be happier about where we are today, and where we’re heading tomorrow.
No Film School, 2010-2014.
I’d also like to thank the old site for holding it together for so long — at last count we were running 38 plugins inside of a precarious and overtaxed Wordpress install. It’s amazing the old site lasted this long, considering I slapped the design together in a week, on my laptop, almost five years ago. For posterity’s sake, I'm adding an image of what the old site looked like...
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Finally, I’d like to thank all of you for being valuable members of our community… even when there were no community features. We’ve worked long and hard to build something that can make a real difference in all of our creative endeavors, but the platform is only as helpful as we make it for each other. So please join us, and let us know your thoughts!
Pascal Plante's Red Rooms isn't the least bit shy about the pertinent question it spends its runtime exploring—where did our obsession with serial killers come from, and what happens when it's taken to far?
Red Rooms is centered around the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man who is accused of murdering young girls on the dark web where spectators can compete in bidding wars to watch the horrific, brutal murders. Whether or not he is innocent is to be determined.
This might seem on the surface like a graphic whodunnit about the killer himself, but it isn't that at all. Red Rooms is about the relationship between Clementine (Laurie Babin) and Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), two woman obsessed with Ludovic. Clementine swears he didn't commit the crimes and is being wrongly accused. Kelly-Anne? Her intentions remain ambiguous to the film's closing moments.
From the tension-building opening courtroom oner establishing the crimes of the Red Room killer to Red Rooms final shot, Plante does a spectacular job exploring everything from the inter-personal friendship of two lost strangers to what aspects of culture draw us to graphic ture crime and mythologizing serial killers.
It's very good!
In honor of Red Rooms VOD release last Friday, we were lucky enough to chat with Plante about his wonderful film. We talk researching the dark web, the challenges of shooting screens, and the importance of empathy in film.
We even have an exclusive BTS clip. Check it out!
Editor's note: the following quotes from Pascal Plante are edited for length and clarity.
Exclusive BTS Clip
Origins of the Idea for Red Rooms
"As you said, since it is multifaceted. There's a few simple things that came first, and eventually it got more and more complex as I went along.
The core of doing the film from a vantage point of somebody who's obsessed with a killer came roughly 10 years ago. I watch lots of movies, so the inspiration always comes from the same place. You see so many cliches, and films that are done and redone in kind of the same way. What's the take that I feel like I'm craving? That I'm missing somehow?
With investigation films, there are plenty about serial killers. You have portraits of the killers. There's been a few of those—the periphery of a killer.
Whenever I was watching a true crime show or whatever, there would always be a couple shots of—mostly women, but women with billboards in the courtroom. I felt like I wanted a film about them. This is really interesting. This is really intriguing. But in order to do it well, I had to do lots of research, because I can't be biased. If I write characters I don't love, at the very least I should try and understand them. If I have prejudices, or if I'm judgmental towards them, it won't work.
I read about it to the point where the phenomenon becomes less about like, "Oh, look at these crazy women." It's more about, "Oh, look at the culture that allows this behavior to exist."
And then why is it that? What are the components?
So one thing led to another, and I wanted to talk about obsession with killers, then I kind of had to talk about the media in a way, because, in a way, they are the ones that create the myth around the killer and the aura around the killers.
In my research I found it's not about the physical beauty of the killers that attracts people. It's really how mythified that person is. [The killer] could be ugly by regular standards of beauty and still attracts tons and tons. Charles Manson had daily wedding proposals at the end of his life, and he had, like, no teeth. But anyway, so point being is that the media [mythologizes], but then also, by watching lots of true crime and thrillers and all of that, I felt like we give killers way too much power.
If we give them a six hour Netflix show, they win, in a way—[they're often] narcissistic monsters. And sometimes you feel a bit like an accomplice almost if you watch so many hours.
And that got me thinking and researching about newer technologies.If I'm a psychopath 2021, what are the tools that I could use? And that led me to the whole dark web rabbit hole that became an epiphany—what if their was an audience for crimes?
It kept building [to Red Rooms]."
Researching for a Realistic Dark Web
Red Rooms
Courtesy of Utopia
"I didn't go method in the research. It's not that I'm scared of the dark network. If anything, I have a very bias, almost positive opinion about it in the sense that the technology in itself is good technology. I think we can all sit down and agree that having a tool that doesn't allow a third party to spy on your every move online is not evil in itself.
It's human nature, man.
It's almost like the Old West when it's lawless, and that's where the darkness of the human soul comes out—that's basically what's to blame here with no Sheriff in town.
It's very easy to go on the dark network. You just go download the thing, and you're pretty much set. But I didn't want to improvise. I did lots of research about it. I didn't feel the need to necessarily engage with it first degree, but I had consultants that understand these tools.
I had people in cyber crime read the screenplay and exchanged with them. I had a guy that understands everything online, and he helped me also with all the hacking stuff. I had legal consultants.
I stayed sane. I stayed safe from it. I can watch very gory fiction films, but if it's fake, it's safe. It can be very brutal. But there's always a sense in something in your brain that tells you, oh, no, this is make believe, this is still safe, even though it might be looking extreme and sound extreme. Whereas if it's real, it can be almost nothing, and it's already too much true, and because it's real and somebody real died.
That's also tied to another thing that I think is not the right word, maybe, but what I'm trying to say about it is I'm trying to gauge where, how is our empathy doing through these tools? And I didn't want to fall prey to what I'm trying to denounce, or at the least comment on by going overboard with my own research.
There's that fine ethical line to walk on doing all this."
The Power of Withholding Violence and Graphic Images
Red Rooms
Courtesy of Utopia
"There's a kind of dance that I'm trying to have with the audience's brain—their needs and wants. If you're seeking a dark thriller, you might expect to see some of it makes you wonder, what do you even expect from such a thriller? Do you want to see that? If so, what does it say about you?
Because you say, "Oh, I hope I don't see that." And I hear that often and I hear, and so that's good. You win an award for being potentially an empathetic person.
I have people come and talk to me and be like, oh, I wish you'd shown the [Red Room] video". I'm like, okay, well, maybe jokes on you, but it is fine. That's a valid take, potentially. But it's just either you want or you don't want to see it that's on you. But the foreplay about it is interesting. Do I want to see it? Or will it lead there? And if not, how? So you play with just the anticipation and the needs and the wants of the audience for such a film, and that's fun to do. I'm trying to be a better chess player than the audience watching it the first time.
We only do show one brief image of the Red Room, and even that was a debate. But I wanted to see the eyes of the killer.. And even Clementine and the Killer, they have kind similar-ish eyes. So that's even tied to potentially why Clementine connects to the killer in the first place. I have these eyes and he has these eyes, and I would never do that. So he would never do that—that kind of weird logic.
But seeing his eyes felt interesting narratively to have that moment where there's no more contest here, that's him. But even that was debated."
The Unassuming Challenges of Shooting Screens
Red Rooms
Courtesy of Utopia
"Oh, filming screens. This is hell on Earth.
Because it looks easy everywhere in our lives. Even right now, I'm looking at a screen, I will look at screens every day, but it's very uninteresting. It's a 2D plane. It's hard to have the eye because in 3D, even though a film is 2D at the end of the day, but having 3D, you play with depth of field, you have another dimension to guide the eye, whereas for a screen you don't. Then if you want the audience to look at a precise spot in the screen you can angle the screen and create a fake vector field and you really aim it there. But that can feel very like, "oh, I'm taking your hand and this is very what you should be watching."
And you can't just build interfaces—an interface that has the narrative info super highlighted,—because then it wouldn't be unrealistic. The screen is chaotic. Even now there's so many things on my fucking screen. So it's way harder than it sounds, and there's so many screens [in Red Rooms].
So yeah, it's just like a lot of brainstorm with the DP. It's like, we'll do split diopter, we'll put a glass in front of the screen to have a shot-counter-shot. We had a lot of ideas and everything stuck, everything ended up being in the film. Otherwise it would be just too uninteresting looking.
It was very tedious."
Creating a Believable Dark Web Poker Game
"We had to pre-program everything in the poker game, this character, this amount, this character folds, etc. It was very complex just to pre-animate something. We take that for granted. It's a game, but then, no, it needs to be on a screen.
There's almost like a screenplay on the side of the real screenplay, which literally says, "okay, that character bids, this character folds." And even, and then on the message bars, I also wanted the misogyny and violence of the dark, deep culture of people online. I wouldn't put that in the main screenplay, but then of course, I had to write all of these [dark web poker characters] as well. So there's now the hidden side screenplay with all of these technicalities, which are super tedious to plan and tedious to film.
I wanted somebody who doesn't know how to play poker to still get enough of a sense of what's at stake and what's going on that they still can be somewhat engaged in it. And that's easier said than done.
And then the talk show scene, that's very hard to do as well. We actually filmed the Fake Talk show, edited it, then we had the actresses on set [responding to it in the separate scene]."
Pascal's Wisdom for Filmmakers
Pascale Plante
Courtesy of Utopia
"What works for me is I don't try to imitate what I like. I try to come up with something that I crave, and I don't see.
It's too easy to be like, "oh, I like this film and I want to make my own little version of this." But then how is that pertinent? How is that relevant? Because the original film still exists.
So for me, what validates the whole artistic process, is, yeah, I've never seen this film. I wish I'd seen this film. I'm humbly going to try my luck at doing the film that I crave and that I miss and that I just don't see. But that's hard because so many people think about what previously worked.
Unless you have a very creative producer, people reading your screenplay want this movie, meets that movie. Something very simple or understandable—a proven recipe. You almost have to fight back against it.
Long answer to say, yeah, I just watch tons of films to try and come up with films that don't look like all of the films that I watch."
No Film School, 2010-2014.
