A lot of the people I look up to in the film world didn’t attend film school, , and honestly, that always made sense to me. In film school, you’re usually learning from people who have never actually completed their own film, which always bothered me.
Along with the performance anxiety I suffered from at the time, that was a huge reason I ended up dropping out all together. I wanted to learn from people who were actually making films, not just teaching and speaking in theories. I don’t know if that was arrogant of me or what.
So I signed up for a Filmmaker Bootcamp class in downtown Miami at the FilmGate headquarters. My instructor that day was Cassius Corrigan, the Miami filmmaker behind Huracán, a psychological drama that tackles mental-health taboos through the story of an MMA fighter living with dissociative identity disorder.
He was born and raised in Miami and returned to his hometown to make his first feature film. At the time of his class, the film was still in post-production, and he walked us through his experience making it.
He was doing all three, the exact trifecta I had always dreamed of for myself: writing, directing, and acting. That made it even more inspiring… He was living the thing I wanted.
He wasn’t a retired professor. He wasn’t someone quoting textbooks. He was someone who was in the arena, editing, fundraising, fighting for every scene, every cut, every moment of the story.
I was actually learning from someone who made a real film in Miami and you could feel that energy on him. That mixture of exhaustion, obsession, and purpose that creative people wear on their skin without realizing it. He wasn’t a retired professor.
And the way he broke down filmmaking made it feel achievable in a way that film school never did. He talked about:
- the micro-budget problem solving
- building tension through camera movement
- using constraints as creative advantages
- the emotional psychology behind performance
Walking out of that classroom today, I felt genuinely inspired. I’ve been trying to finish my script, and hopefully this time I won’t let any distractions pull me away from it. Today really lit something in me like real momentum.
There aren’t a lot of filmmakers in Miami I can learn from, so getting the chance to sit in a room with someone who’s actively making a film felt rare and motivating in a way I didn’t expect.
If I can hold onto this feeling, I know I can finish what I started. Maybe this is the push I needed.
Honestly, Vanessa 