Is a Digital Filmmaking Career for You?

Explore digital filmmaking and possible careers.

Film School Home | Film Job Snapshots | Find Film Schools

Careers on the Cutting Edge

For film school students interested in digital filmmaking, career opportunities are growing. Digital filmmaking isn't just for low budget indie movies anymore.

Recent years have seen major Hollywood productions embracing digital filmmaking practices (think "127 Hours," "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "The Social Network"). So is digital technology making 35mm film obsolete? For now, at least, the answer is no, but it's certainly one of the most exciting and revolutionary opportunities in filmmaking today.

Advantages of Digital Filmmaking

Even those who don't go gaga for cutting-edge technology should be able to recognize that digital filmmaking presents some amazing opportunities in the film industry. Consider the following:

Digital filmmaking is accessible. Relatively low cost and user friendly, digital recording equipment is the personal computer of the film industry. While this could be seen as a threat to the establishment, these new voices in film can also inspire others and bring new energy to the film industry.
Editing is simple. Like digital recording equipment, editing equipment for digital film is affordable and also easy to master. Postproduction can be less cumbersome in the digital world. If someone with no training in digital film editing can do a reasonable job on their Mac, imagine what someone with digital filmmaking career training could do.
Digital distribution reaches a wide audience. You no longer need a big marketing budget to reach a wide audience. Today, your movie could take off on YouTube. Digitally formatted films aren't bound to traditional distribution methods.A little success could open big doors for your film career.

Challenges of Digital Filmmaking

Digital filmmakers do face some unique and unexpected challenges:

Long-term storage is problematic for digital films. While film gets a bad rap for degrading over the years, according to a recent article in Variety, digital film actually presents a much larger problem when it comes to long-term storage. Original digital data files can degrade in a few short years—or even months.
The way digital films are stored today may be the equivalent of an eight-track in the audio world tomorrow. When technology changes, someone will need to migrate the footage. This task will only get bigger as digital filmmaking careers become more popular. It will take time and money to maintain digital films for posterity.

It will take creativity and innovation to find solutions as digital technology goes mainstream. So far, the best solution to these problems is to convert digital files to film.