When I was getting ready to graduate high school my classmates were all talking about where they were going to school and what they were going to study. Every time I was asked I proudly said I was going to Salisbury University to study media productions. I was met with confused looks and unending questions. “So you’re going to make movies?” “What are you even going to do with that?”, I also had the pleasure of dealing with those people who were going to study business and politics and they made sure I knew they looked down on my major.
Don’t get me wrong, business and political science are great majors but just because I’m not doing the same work as you it doesn’t mean that I’m taking the easy way out. Cmat majors are just as stressed out as the rest of you, we work just as hard and see just as many sleepless, work filled nights, as the rest of you. I can’t tell you how many times I stayed up working on scripts or trying to figure out run times so my project would follow the strict tv guidelines.
The same way you might spend hours trying to figure out your economics homework or preparing for your huge accounting exam, we spend hours in the studio, running a script, running it again, re-working the script, running the revised vision, and then running that six more times, if not more. Even after that we’re still not done, then we move into the editing which often takes its own absurd amount of time.
But being a Cmat major isn’t just about how to point a camera and record something. Last semester alone I learned how to operate a camera, use the switch board to change what camera appears on the screen, how to work an audio board and the multitude of microphones that come with it, how to be each type of director (yes, there is more than one director), and how to work the lights that cover the ceiling of each studio.
So yeah, being a media productions major is not as easy as you may assume, and if you're lucky enough, you might just make a friend who is a media productions major (please be in their productions, we need actors).
