NYFA Los Angeles | Acting Classroom Building

Mi academia, una de las mayores experiencias y satisfacciones de mi vida.

Childish insecure students who focus on everything except learning. The environment is toxic and full of people coming there to either date each other, live together, hookup or cause problems for other students who try to mind their business and learn

Went there for a 2 week Photo camp. Awesome experience and i learned a lot. Most of the classes where focused on practical work. After School activities and field trips 10/10 and extremely nice counselors. Price is a bit on the upper Limit.

I'm very happy with the screenwriting program. Most of the teachers were really good (I had two teachers that I reeeally didn't like, but during these years I had about twenty teachers or something, probably even more, so most of them were still great) and knew what they were talking about. I did filmmaking for two semesters before I transferred to bfa screenwriting. I wasn't as happy with filmmaking, but it's still good. Most of the teachers were good, but the ones who weren't were pretty terrible. The schedule was also pretty messy, but I learned a lot and got to shoot many different things. NYFA is good, but very intense so be ready for lots of work!

This will be a rather lengthy review but long story short it's a waste of money. Disclaimer: I was kicked out due to excessive absences. Take that as you will, this was back in October and I've waited to post this so I don't come off as a sore loser who is just mad about being kicked out. First thing is I had about 8 acting teachers and I respected only two of them. Bob Lipton to date has been hands down the best acting coach/teacher I've ever seen even against coaches and teachers from other schools. The other 6 were garbage to say the least. Had super ego issues that reeked of "since I didn't become a famous actor i don't want to see anyone else become one and they should never question my methods." Almost got into a physical confrontation with Mark Ivan who I backed off from because I didn't want to go jail. I have a short temper, but I manage to keep nothing more than words 99% of the time but this guy was ready to fight. I could see the look in his eyes. All of the class saw it and was shocked. He was among the worst. Paying 30,000 for a year... listen, if you're fortunate not to have to have a special visa to be in the US please please please go to local acting classes. The only advantage this school has is that they take you to the backlots on Universal to work. If you can afford to just blow 30k to do that, than this place is for you. Another thing I noticed and I have nothing against actors/actresses from other countries many foreign movies stars are my favs, but a good majority of the ones who went here just seemed like they wanted to come to the U.S. to party and didn't really have any ambition on pursuing the industry as a passion. Two of them I knew even admitted they were more interested in psychology and for some odd reason thought acting would help them in that field. I can't say whether or not that's valid, but what I can say it seemed they were almost always out partying and not focusing on their work. Now I have been going through some serious personal issues that caused me to miss quite a bit of class so one could make the case that I'm not the one to speak about that to which I would respond, rather simply, fair enough. But I feel I can say this and the school had told me I couldn't miss as many classes as I did the first semester in the second which I didn't plan on. Little did I know they kicked me out because of low GPA which they should have known about when I was told during the first semester I was put on academic probation for missing too many classes. Well, you can't really go back in time and make up acting in films that have already been shot. So my grades were obviously going to be bad. So to me, I wasn't really given a true second chance. Either way, before they even told me about this, I was already upset with school because I didn't feel like it was worth the money I was paying. Another thing I did not like is the fact they taught you editing. You can go around all day and say it's good to know editing but I'm not paying you to teach me how to edit, I'm paying you to teach me how improve my acting techniques. They had additional classes such as stage combat and meisner that would have been much more helpful but you couldn't take those classes because you'd have to miss your primary classes if you wanted to. So you'd either have to wait a semester(six months) and just get lucky that your classes wouldn't fall on the same day and time the side classes were or you were SOL. Well, I hold no ill against NYFA. I chose to go there when many other seasoned actors and directors I knew told me not to waste my money and I refused to research into it, but before you decide to either commit to a student loan or fork out cash, please do your research on this school to see if it's right for you and ask for a list of all the acting teachers so you can look into them as well. If you're a true passionate artist who loves acting, you'll save yourself a lot of time, resources, and money and if you haven't figured it out yet because you're not familiar with Los Angeles, you'll need it.