Most Korean applicants arrive at CalArts through animation. The name carries weight in Seoul, the alumni list is famous, and the portfolio work — drawing — is the thing a Korean art academy is built to teach. Film and Video sits in the same school, shares the same deadlines and the same campus in Valencia, and is reached through a completely different kind of preparation. You cannot start it in December for a January deadline.

This article covers the BFA Film and Video program specifically: what the portfolio asks for, what the written materials ask for, what the first year actually teaches, the course codes you will be enrolled in, the two reviews you must pass to graduate, and how the program differs from the two graduate paths above it. Where CalArts publishes a number, we use the school’s number. Where we have our own record, we say how thin it is.

00:01One school, three doors, three portfolios

The School of Film/Video runs three undergraduate programs — Character Animation, Experimental Animation, and Film and Video — plus three graduate programs. They share a dean, a building complex, an 8:1 student–faculty ratio, and a claim the school makes about itself: that 100% of its faculty are working artists, filmmakers, and technicians. What they do not share is an admissions standard.

We wrote the Character Animation and Experimental Animation articles first, and the contradiction between those two was the single most useful thing we found all year. Character Animation requires a minimum of fifteen observational drawings, not from photo or screen reference. Experimental Animation states that figure, landscape, still life, and perspective drawings are generally not acceptable — the exact category the program next door demands. Film and Video adds a third position: it does not want drawings at the centre of the portfolio at all. It wants film.

Compiled from the three CalArts program admission pages, September 2026. Each program publishes its own requirements; they are not interchangeable.

Read the table sideways and the practical conclusion appears: a student who prepares for one of these doors has not prepared for the other two. A drawing portfolio built over a year for Character Animation cannot be resubmitted to Film and Video, because Film and Video’s first line is about runtime, not sheets. This matters in Korea, where applicants routinely apply to several programs at one school on the assumption that a school has a house style. CalArts does not.

00:02What the portfolio actually asks for

The Film and Video portfolio is film- or video-based work with a suggested total runtime of ten minutes. It may be one piece or several. The program adds a sentence that most applicants misread as politeness: five minutes of quality material is better than ten minutes of mediocre work. It is not politeness. It is the grading instruction, published in advance.

Three constraints do most of the filtering.

Work in other fields may be added as supplementary material — artwork, photography, installation, drawing, design, sound. It supplements. It does not substitute. Celluloid shot on 16mm or super 8 has to be telecined for digital upload, and any work not in English requires subtitles.

The single sentence that should govern a Korean applicant’s year of preparation is the one about shooting your own material. Academies here are organised around teaching a craft in a room. A film portfolio requires leaving the room, holding a camera, and finishing something. Ten minutes of finished work with your own cinematography inside it is a nine-month project, not a winter-vacation project.

00:03The written materials are the real filter

The artist statement runs 500 to 1,000 words and answers three questions: the issues that inform your practice, your relationship with experimental, independent, or avant-garde filmmaking, and your artistic goals. The second question is the one that decides fit. A student whose entire reference set is commercial narrative — feature drama, streaming series, advertising — will find nothing to write, and the absence will be visible.

Four further documents follow, each in the same 500 to 1,000 word range: a list of your submitted works with synopses, comments on the films, books and shows that have influenced your work, a plan for future projects, and a resume noting special skills. Scripts and screenplays are excluded from the project plan. An optional creative writing sample of up to 1,500 words is allowed, again with no scripts.

Counted together, that is between 2,000 and 4,000 words of application writing, plus two letters of recommendation, which are required here as they are at Character Animation and Experimental Animation — and unlike at Pratt or SVA, where recommendations are optional. Applicants who leave the writing to the last week produce the same four documents in the same voice, and the sameness is legible.

00:04First year: technique before vision

The first year is a technical year. Required core workshops cover film and video production, editing workflow, sound production, and design. The program describes what these classes deliver in a way that no other article in this series has had to quote — alongside artistic skill, it names vocational skills, abilities that can serve as a future means of financial support.

What the school says it wants to produce is the total filmmaker — a phrase it attributes to Fernando Solanas — someone capable of handling the production, not one specialist role within it. That is why sound is a required course in the first year rather than an elective in the third, and why cinematography, editing and post-production sound each appear as separate graded classes rather than as topics inside a single survey.

00:05The sequence, by course code

Course codes and credit values from the CalArts catalog listing for the BFA in Film and Video, September 2026. Requirements are revised periodically; confirm against the catalog in your application year.

Two features of this sequence are worth naming. The first is FPFV153 Cinematic Voices: In Person, taken in both semesters of the second year, and FPFV450 Visiting Filmmaker Workshop, required once before graduation. Contact with working filmmakers is not left to a lecture series a student may or may not attend; it is a graded requirement. The second is that the thesis is a two-year object. It begins in the third year and is completed in the fourth, which means the third-year student is already committed to a subject while still taking critique.

00:06Two reviews you have to pass

Admission is not the last gate. Academic and artistic progress is assessed at a Mid-Residency Review during the student’s third semester, and every BFA student must pass a Graduation Review in the final semester to complete the degree. This is the same structure we found in both animation programs, and it is unusual enough among American art schools to be worth stating plainly to Korean families: at CalArts, the degree is conditional on a jury, twice.

For an international student the mid-residency review lands in the autumn of the second year — early enough that a student who has drifted still has time, late enough that the drift is already measurable. It is the reason we tell applicants that the first year’s technical workshops are not something to survive on the way to the interesting classes. They are the evidence base for the first review.

00:07Where the degree can go next

The School of Film/Video runs three graduate programs, and two of them are easy to confuse from Seoul.

From the CalArts program pages for the two degrees, September 2026.

The distinction is not prestige, it is form. A student who wants to make a feature-length fiction film should read the Film Directing page first; a student whose work is essayistic, documentary, abstract, or installation-based belongs in Film and Video. The BFA leads naturally to either, and the school’s own description of undergraduate breadth — from personal essays and political documentaries to experiments in narrative, from lyrical and abstract films to installation and expanded cinema — is the clearest statement of what the undergraduate degree is training you to choose between.

00:08Who teaches

The school is led by Dean Ranu Mukherjee. Rebecca Baron is Associate Dean and teaches in Film and Video. Among the faculty CalArts names for the program are James Benning, whose structural landscape films are taught in film schools worldwide, Betzy Bromberg, and Jheanelle Brown, who also programs at REDCAT, the institute’s downtown Los Angeles theatre. In Film Directing the named faculty include Lee Anne Schmitt, Gary Mairs, Abigail Severance, and Ki Jin Kim.

We name faculty here for one practical reason. The artist statement asks about your relationship to experimental, independent and avant-garde film. An applicant who has watched two Benning films and can say something specific about duration in them has an answer. An applicant who has read a faculty list has a name.

00:09What a year costs

CalArts is one of the few schools in this series that publishes a complete cost of attendance rather than leaving families to assemble one. For 2026–27, undergraduate tuition is $62,954 and mandatory fees are $730. On-campus housing is $8,304 and food is $9,406. Those four lines are what the accounting department actually bills: about $81,400 a year.

The published total cost of attendance is $90,455, which adds the school’s estimates for books and supplies, transportation, personal expenses and medical cover. CalArts draws the distinction itself, calling the first group direct costs and the second indirect — a distinction worth carrying into a family conversation, because only the first group arrives as an invoice.

Two comparisons place it. CalArts housing at $8,304 is the least expensive in this series by a wide margin; Parsons publishes $15,150 and SVA’s range runs from roughly $18,700 to $23,300. And CalArts tuition sits below RISD’s $66,460 and Pratt’s $64,703, and above Parsons at $62,348. Valencia is not Manhattan, and the housing line is where that shows up in the arithmetic.

00:10English, on the new TOEFL scale

In January 2026 ETS replaced the TOEFL iBT scale. The 0–120 total is gone; scores are now reported from 1 to 6 in half-band steps, and the total is the average of the four section scores rather than their sum. ETS advised institutions that previously required 100 to set 5 on the new scale.

CalArts currently publishes a TOEFL requirement of 4 and a Duolingo requirement of 105 — the most accessible published English threshold among the schools in this series. SVA publishes 4.5 and Duolingo 115; RISD publishes 5, up from a previous 93; Pratt still publishes 92 on the old scale; Parsons publishes no cut score at all and places students by examination after arrival.

Two cautions. A published minimum is a filter, not a target, and Film and Video asks for several thousand words of application writing before anyone reads your transcript. And schools are updating these pages at different speeds, which is why a figure like Pratt’s 92 still appears in old units. Check the page in the month you apply.

00:11What our own record shows — and what it does not

Royal Blue keeps a record of every acceptance we have confirmed directly with the student: 1,099 acceptances across 95 schools between 2009 and 2026, of which 454 carried scholarship money. That is an award rate of 41.3% and $23,746,972 in total awards.

We do not publish a CalArts school-level award rate, for the same reason we did not publish one in the Character Animation and Experimental Animation articles: our CalArts sample is not large enough for a rate to carry information. A percentage calculated on a handful of cases looks like data and behaves like noise. The nearest useful figures in our record are at major level.

Royal Blue admissions records, 1,099 acceptances across 95 schools, 2009–2026. Initial award letters. Averages are published only where the number of awards is large enough to be stable; where it is not, we publish the rate and no figure. Overall award rate 41.3% (454 awards, $23,746,972 total).

Animation is the highest award rate of any major in our record, at 58%. We are not going to convert that into a claim about Film and Video, because film is not animation and our film-side sample is small. What the figure supports is narrower and still useful: among Korean students we have placed, moving-image majors have not been the poor relations of the design disciplines when scholarship money is distributed.

00:12A twelve-month preparation, working backwards

The deadline structure at CalArts is the same for every program in every school. A preferred deadline on 1 December carries a reduced application fee of $65; the regular deadline on 5 January carries $85; applications are then received on a rolling basis until each program closes. CalArts is explicit that the preferred deadline is not early decision — it is a fee discount, and it requires that everything, portfolio and letters included, arrives by that date.

Counting back from a January deadline, a workable schedule looks like this.

FAQFrequently asked questions

Can I apply to Film and Video and Character Animation with the same portfolio?

No. Character Animation requires a minimum of fifteen observational drawings made without photo or screen reference, plus a page-through sketchbook video. Film and Video asks for roughly ten minutes of film or video work with at least one piece you shot yourself. Neither satisfies the other, and Experimental Animation states that the drawing categories Character Animation requires are generally not acceptable. Three doors, three portfolios.

I have never shot a film. Is one year enough?

It is enough to make two or three short pieces if you start in the spring, and not enough if you start in the autumn. The binding constraint is not equipment; phones and entry-level cameras are accepted, and CalArts says professional equipment is not required for the video introduction. The constraint is that finished work takes longer than people expect, and the program explicitly prefers complete works over excerpts.

Should I submit a screenplay to show my story ability?

No. Screenplays are named among the things not to submit, and the future project plan document also excludes scripts. If you want to demonstrate writing, use the optional creative writing sample of up to 1,500 words, which likewise excludes scripts.

Is the 1 December deadline binding?

No. CalArts states that the preferred deadline is not early decision. It lowers the application fee from $85 to $65 and requires that all materials arrive by that date. Applications continue on a rolling basis after the regular January deadline until each program closes, but a program can close.

Which graduate program follows this BFA?

Both. The MFA in Film and Video is a three-year degree organised around a thesis film, video or installation, with a proposal in the second year. The MFA in Film Directing is also three years and is grounded in narrative cinema, beginning with three to four short films in the first year. The choice is about the form your work takes, not about which is more advanced.

ENDRelated reading

• CalArts Character Animation: the fifteen-drawing requirement, in full
• CalArts Experimental Animation: the portfolio that rejects what the program next door demands
• CalArts Graphic Design
• CalArts program updates
• RISD Film / Animation / Video, for comparison
• Building a portfolio as an international student
• CalArts MFA Film Directing, official page