Hi, my name is Aidan Killeen and I am a student at Cleveland State University’s film school. I’m actively pursuing my Baccalaureate of Arts and I’m currently in my final year (hopefully). I’m a big fan of being both in front of and behind the camera, but more recently I’ve taken up the torch for the “it sucks but someone has to do it” jobs on set such as PA, grip, and sound on very long takes (my shoulders scream in agony whenever I see a boom pole). I mostly chose to go into film because of my childhood of watching westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza as well as M*A*S*H with my grandmother, who loved the romanticized idea of the plucky but occasionally moronic heroes of yore. There’s nothing quite like the gunslinging action hero from the 50s-70s. And I must admit, it absolutely grew on me.
One day in highschool, I was thinking about my favorite movie Dante’s Peak and wondered, “How did they actually make that?” So naturally when I got home I completely forgot about all my homework and found the ‘behind the scenes’ for the movie online and loved every second of it. So the next year I signed up for film classes and loved every second of it. Of course, what I made wasn’t cinema reel ready (and couldn’t be farther from it actually), but I loved to actually make something that I could show people that wasn’t math problems on a homework page. So naturally I stuck with it and eventually found my way to Cleveland State University’s film school.
I’ve been in film school for nearly four years now and I can honestly say that I love it and have learned more in my four years there than I have anywhere else. After I heard that I had gotten the internship at the Greater Cleveland Film Commission I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it! I could finally learn from people actively in the industry instead of people who washed up and became teachers who teach like it’s 1999 and HD was just invented. I can finally learn what goes into a location scout, or a script breakdown, or a budget, and so on in terms of the current climate of the film industry. I hope that I can apply what I learn and make the films I want to make. Weather it be as a lone man with a cheap camera or a massive hollywood production, and anywhere in between.