Scholarship Requirements

Our industry instructors across all our disciplines have come together to provide our future students with guidelines and tips for a successful creative portfolio, which is required during the application process.

Select your area of study for specific guidelines and tips:

Acting for Film
Filmmaking

Applying For Scholarship (Acting for Film Diploma Programs)

Monologue Requirements:

The creative portfolio for the Acting program should be a selection of work that shows the breadth and depth of your acting abilities. Each performance should have a strong emotional arc.

• Please prepare two contemporary (published after 1960) monologues
• Monologues should be contrasting: one dramatic, one comedic
• Monologues should be approximately 60-90 seconds in length each

Choosing Monologues:

• Read through different selections of material until you find something that feels like you: material that you can relate to and makes you feel something emotional as you read.
• Choose pieces that fit you right now, not the person you might be in the future. Select monologues that are age-appropriate and allow you to express the uniqueness of who you are and speak to your strengths.
• Choose monologues that are ACTIVE. This means that the character has to be clearly pursuing an OBJECTIVE with another character (Objective: what does my character want the other character to do, think, say or feel). It is the pursuit of the objective that gives the monologue action.
• Monologues should take place in the present. It should not be a memory or a character telling a story.

How To Prepare Your Monologues:

• Now that you've chosen your monologues, you have to make them yours. You should read the entire play or screenplay, as it will help you make specific choices.
• You may also transcribe the pieces from a film and then work from the written text, rather than re-watching the original actor’s performance. We are looking for your unique interpretation of the material.
• Ask yourself:
  • Who am I? What is my relationship with the other character?
  • Where am I?
  • What does my character want?
  • What is the obstacle to getting what I want?
  • How am I going to get what I want? (What action will you use? Will you demand, intimidate, flirt, convince them you are right?)
  • What is my character feeling? Does it change through the monologue? Are they angry, sad, happy? Does the emotion change by either them getting or not getting their objective? (The emotion should change.)
  • What just happened right before the monologue starts?
• When auditioning with a monologue you will want to create the other character. You “create them” by putting them just to the side of the camera. Make sure you listen to “the other character” and take in their reactions.
• Memorise your monologue; do not read off a script or a phone.

Applying For Scholarship (Filmmaking Diploma Programs)

Creative Portfolio Requirements:

When reviewing applicants for the Filmmaking Program, we are looking for students to distil their creativity into a variety of different works that will display their abilities as well as their potential as storytellers. Ideally, students would submit material they directed. That could be short films, video sketches, web series, taped plays or any other works they directed. If you don’t have content you directed, then any content that you contributed to creatively [screenwriter, editor, cinematographer, for example] is also acceptable.

If that type of content is not available, then writing samples are the next best artefact for us to review. Screenplays, teleplays, manuscripts, treatments--essentially anything that will show us your ability to tell a story.

Tips:

1. Everything will always come back to story. Being able to articulate a story is the most essential part of the Filmmaking program. We want to see your ability to contribute to the storytelling process

2. Quality is more important than quantity. We’d rather review one strong project that speaks to your ability to tell a story than several projects that have technical issues, production issues or story problems.

3. Artistic voice: Do you have a unique way of seeing the world? Are you trying to say something personal with the work you have submitted?

4. Visual style: Do you make truly cinematic choices in your work? Are you making conscious decisions about where to put the camera in order to best tell the story? And are you making use of all the elements of composition to paint the images you are creating?

When reviewing portfolios, we look for someone who is a keen observer of life and what it means to be a human being. We also look for sensitivity, the ability to feel things deeply and profoundly. We look for people with vision, who can take their thoughts and feelings and express them creatively in whatever medium they’ve chosen. And last, but not least, we’re looking for passion, the applicant’s ability to inspire others by sharing their love of the creative process.

Ultimately, we’re looking for candidates who have demonstrated a well thought out approach to the portfolio they have put together – works that allow us to see their potential and who they one day want to become as filmmakers.

Lastly, and this goes hand in hand with voice, be creative. Be funny, or quirky, or gritty, or dramatic, or scary, or fantastical. Be you.

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