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Origin Story
The Charlotte Unconventional Film School was an idea in April, 2017. I (Julie McElmurry) was contemplating taking a 7 day intensive course at a big-name filmmaking school in another city for $2000. I’d been learning documentary filmmaking by doing documentary filmmaking for 2 years at that point and wanted some in-person instruction from pros.
My husband and I sat down with index cards and wrote out all the things I wanted to learn. Then we asked the question, what’s another way I can learn these things? Using this Design Thinking technique, we realized there were working filmmaking professionals locally, in Charlotte, who could teach those things. We realized I could stay at home in Charlotte rather than go to that other city for a week. We realized there are probably other men and women in town who want to learn all or some of these things as well. We realized this $2000 could be put towards making this new thing happen in Charlotte, with local people over the course of months.
Skip ahead to today (November of 2018) and I am looking over our soon-to-be announced schedule for Spring of 2019. I hope to recruit a cohort of core people who want to take all of our Spring classes together, bonding and working together on movies about local non profits. I am delighted to announce very soon a major partner for the spring which is aligned with our goals and is providing us with the space and cushion we need to keep at this for two more quarters while on the side we try a bunch of crazy experiments to see what else we can do.
Talented men and women have emerged in this year and a half who also care about the education, promotion and appreciation of local filmmakers and we’re thrilled that one way they do that is via the work of The Charlotte Unconventional Film School (CUFS). We have been taught by award-winning, critically acclaimed filmmakers with expertise in directing, writing, editing, producing and more. We have been taught by the coordinator of a local monthly film festival who, in 2018 alone, has reviewed over 1,000 movies.
CUFS is only a year and a half old. We’re evolving and we’re learning to articulate what we are about and who we are here to serve. Ultimately, we are about bringing people together. Through filmmaking. We look forward to partnering with more and more non-profits, businesses and other organizations in order to be exponentially more effective than either of us would be on our own. Stay tuned for a big announcement about that Spring 2018 partner and the accompanied events we’ll be doing, thanks to them!
