Of the many film education organizations out there for students, the New York Film Academy is one of the largest and perhaps the most advertised. Based out of New York City, the NYFA operates schools all over the United States and even beyond. During the summer of 2003, looking to further my education in the world of filmmaking, I enrolled in the four-week high school filmmaking workshop at Universal Studios Hollywood.

On the flight from Boston to Los Angeles, I sat next to a man with a gun. He was an air marshall, but it was unsettling nonetheless. I arrived at LAX and found a guy wearing a NYFA t-shirt, who didn't seem to notice me when I first approached him. I got my duffel bag and sat down with a few other new arrivals until everyone got their bags. We went outside and boarded one of the 15-passenger vans that I would eventually become all too familiar with. I was the only male in the van, and during the ride I was treated to nonstop conversations about shopping in LA. I learned that my filmmaking course was not the only one being offered at the time in that specific location; there was also an acting workshop that would be lasting the same four weeks and was composed of the same age group. This turned out to be nice because we had these acting students at our disposal for our films.

We arrived at the Oakwood Apartment complex, situated on a hillside directly across the street from the back entrance of Universal Studios and about two blocks away from Warner Brothers Studios. Walking up the road to the complex offered a fantastic view of the Warner lot. We went inside one of the clubhouses and awkwardly sat around and met with the other new arrivals. They gave us our keys and maps of the campus, and we went off to find our apartments. The Oakwood complex is enormous, and I lost count of the amount of times I got lost in my attempts to navigate it. It's composed of at least 20 apartment buildings and two clubhouses. The clubhouse at the other end of the campus was our base of operations; it was where we ate, hung out, and met when we would go out at night.

On the first day, we met at the parking lot that became known as the "car wash" because there was a car wash tent there, but it was never in service. We piled into the NYFA-branded 15-passenger vans and drove across the street to a building that we would be walking to for the rest of the four weeks. The building was a Universal production office, and NYFA's offices were situated on the first floor across an open courtyard. This was a working production office; I remember at the time "The Terminal" was in pre-production here. Some people said that they often saw Steven Speilberg and Tom Hanks strolling the halls. The first thing that we did when we arrived was have our pictures taken for our Universal security ID's, which we would need to get into the building and the studio and, as we would later find out, get to the front of the lines at the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park.

The first several days were just classes. It was basic filmmaking stuff; composing, storytelling, scriptwriting, etc. We had a couple days of editing instruction in the beautiful FCP lab with a teacher that looked curiously like John Cusack. The curriculum of this course was based around the production of three films, each of increasing complexity. The first film would 2 minutes and be black and white with no sound, and the second would 3 minutes and be black and white with sound, and the third was 5-6 minutes, in color, and with sound. For the first film, my directing day brought me to a set used in Jurassic Park III, situated next to the Bates Motel and the Great Outdoors cabin on the Universal backlot. Even when not shooting, just being on the backlot was a blast. Every time a tram rolled by, we'd wave at the tourists as if we were celebrities. That never got old.