A Little Bit of Background

"We find one of the most positive aspects of the Academy's approach to teaching is that they endeavour to explain to students, not only how things should be done, but also how we, in the industry actually do them. The industry-based approach prepares students for employment in the area of film and television far more effectively than most academic approaches........"

A quote from a letter from the Technical Services Manager of Samuelson Film Service (which later became part of Panavision).

This letter was written in 1996, eleven years after APA commenced training. In fact Ian Ingram Young, founder and Principal spoke extensively with Samuelsons and many other film companies before writing his first industry based course for APA in 1984. Now in 2011 his new Do It Yourself Film Course stills follows a similar approach, but because it is remote learning it has been designed to accommodate a wider range of people wishing to make professional looking films.

Students from all over the world, from too many countries to list here, have studied at APA International Film School, usually referred to as APA or The Academy, and a high percentage of them are now working successfully in the film and television industry. In addition to their training, in many instances longstanding friendships have been forged which have led to working partnerships, working on colleagues' films, and even marriages.

Dammi il La and Jonah's Quids both saw APA graduates from 5 or 6 different countries come together to make these award winning shorts and just recently a number met up in Sweden to work on Urban Sounds. Three graduates from Canada, Brazil and Kenya have made a documentary, An Unexpected Family, which won an ACS award for the cinematographer. These are just a few of many examples.

If you would like to know more about The Academy we suggest you just glance through the Production Diary and Where Are They Now pages. You can also view trailers of some of our graduates' films and hundreds of photos taken by them on their shoots.

Our graduates' films, both those made whilst they were training at The Academy and afterwards have won many awards at film festivals and it's good to see that some of our DOP's have continued their membership at a non student level at the Australian Cinematographers Society and are still winning awards.

In 2011 we are very excited to introduce the Academy of Photogenic Arts' on line division, The Film Academy, with its Do It Yourself Film Course which enables us to offer our training to so many more people than before and at such an affordable price.

We have dedicated our Do It Yourself Film Course to our face to face graduates and we hope that those of you who ‘decide to take the journey' will have as much success as they have had.