Swapping film credits for course credit

Brooke Goldfinch, a graduate from the University of NSW in Media and Arts, is one of only three Australians in the past decade to have been accepted into the prestigious film programme at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The three-year course boasts alumni including Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Ang Lee and Joel Coen.
 
"I've been working at the ABC for a couple years as a radio news reporter, and it's a great job and I love it, but my real passion is film making," Goldfinch says. "I thought to myself, ‘what would be the best film school in the world to go to?' I jumped onto Google and I found this course. I saw a list of everyone who had been to this school and thought, ‘this is amazing'. These guys are my favourite filmmakers and a huge inspiration for me."
 
Goldfinch does not have the money needed to support her studies, but determination has led her to undertake an alternate approach to sourcing funds. "New York University has given me a scholarship, which will cover roughly a quarter of my fees for the three-year program. Now I need to find the rest. I've come up with the idea of giving away film credits in her future films to anyone who sponsors me."

Goldfinch has created a viral film seeded via YouTube highlighting her plight and plans to blog (http://brookegoldfinch.blogspot.com) and twitter (http://twitter.com/brookegoldfinch) her way through the course so supporters can follow her journey and interact with her along the way.
 
Although Goldfinch does not have any sponsors as yet, she has received a few donations and has generated ample interest. "It has been amazing. In the first week we had the YouTube video up, over 400 people watched. I just put it up on my Facebook site and a couple of my friends put it on their Facebook sites. That's the power of the internet. I don't think I even know 400 people!"

Goldfinch hopes her campaign will continue to generate publicity and support after she jets off to New York at the end of August. "I'm going to go over there with my fingers crossed and make it up as I go along.
 
"What makes the New York University course unique," she explains, "is that it is so rigorous and intensive. You get so much time to hone your craft. The teachers there are all experienced, professional filmmakers. You also do acting, which a lot film schools don't offer. When you're instructing actors it's really good to have had some experience of acting yourself."
 
After studying at New York University, Goldfinch plans to come home to  work in the Australian film industry. Citing her favourite films as Scorsese's Raging Bull ("it's so tightly edited, everything about it is so perfect") and Niki Caro's Whale Rider (it's beautiful and subtle and the relationships are so deft"), she hopes to make films that work on several different levels. "You have to have a plot and I want people to be engaged with that plot, but you also have to have something that resonates with people and makes them feel differently about things, that opens their minds." Joanna Lowry

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