5. Being Poor
This is going to sound truly awful on my part, but if you don't have rich parents willing to pay all of the tuition cost up front you might want to consider skipping film school or getting a communications degree from a state university. Please, allow me to explain myself. While a degree may look good on your resume or on your office wall, and will certainly help if you decide to forget film as a career, in show business your degree means squat. No one cares if you went to a famous school in the entertainment industry and will not give you a job because of it. So essentially you are paying a lot of money for nothing, but the education you receive. Seeing as the average tuition costs for the top film schools in the country come out somewhere around $100,000, not including cost of living in expensive places like New York and California, a great amount of debt can quickly be racked up; debt that has to be paid back upon graduation. What almost always happens is that you will graduate to find the erratic lifestyle of production takes too long to get into and you will have to take a normal job to pay off your debts and live. In the meantime the rich kids from your school will move out to L.A. or New York, party for ten years, and then move back to work for whatever company made their parents rich in the first place. On the other hand it may take you ten years just to get out of debt and have the means just to move out to one of these locations at which point in time you may not want to leave your current career. The other thing to consider is that most schools don't pay for you to make movies. You have to front the cost for any equipment/crew yourself if you want to make a project. Once again the movies that will turn out great will be made by the rich kids and everyone else's project will have to get by with little more than bubblegum and shoelaces. I hate to sound like the most cynical human being on Earth, but consider yourself warned.