Postgrad and Gap Year Options from Legendary Idyllwild Arts Academy in Southern California

Film students wishing to put off their first year of college because of COVID-19 have two exciting alternatives thanks to the Idyllwild Arts Academy Film and Digital Media Department.

Department Chair Shelly Short and her colleagues—all of them experienced film industry professionals—will offer to postgrads as well as gap year students the chance to earn a Film certificate as they focus their studies on Directing, Writing, or Post-Production.

Postgrads who finished high school this past spring will live on the Academy’s forested 205-acre mountain campus. In this beautiful natural setting, they can stay healthy among a student body of well under three hundred, for whom meticulous safety measures have been prepared by the school’s Student Services office. Classes with both the Film Department and Idyllwild Arts’ innovative academic teachers will give the postgrads an extra year of preparation for college.

The Academy’s Film Department emphasizes hands-on instruction for all Film majors, of a kind often missing from college. At some of the top college Film programs, students never touch a camera until their junior year.    

In contrast with the postgrad program, the gap year program will be all-online and will not include academics. Gap year students will receive Film assignments to complete on their own and will meet with each other and their teachers in weekly Zoom sessions.

For young people eager to climb onto a fast track to a filmmaking career, the Post-Production concentration will offer professional Avid User Certifications in Media Composer and Pro-Tools, with testing after a sixteen-week or a thirty-two-week intensive. The Directing and Writing concentrations will also give students an edge over other first-year college Film students.

Admission counselors are happy to give more details about these two programs to students who ask about applying to the Academy.

About Idyllwild Arts Academy and Summer Program
The forested 205-acre Idyllwild Arts campus sits two hours inland from Los Angeles and an hour and one refreshing mile above Palm Springs. The campus hosts Idyllwild Arts Academy, where talented high school students from around the world specialize in their chosen arts disciplines while studying challenging college-prep academics, and the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program, offering immersive workshops in every arts discipline to people of all ages and skill levels. Both the Academy and the Summer Program accomplish the Idyllwild Arts mission of changing lives through the transformative power of art. http://www.Idyllwildarts.org