By Sam Collins

A Tale of Two SCA Students

As evidenced in previous SCABs and chats I’d had with the HUSH lot during my interview day, SCA seems to delight and terrify its students in equal measure. One minute, the school’s students gush over the quality of the teaching, its unrivalled exposure to industry giants or about the closeness of the ‘family’ they’ve become a part of. Keep them chatting long enough though and their skies of optimism begin to darken, their tones grow somber and brows furrow as they warn of sleepless nights, raging arguments and unrelenting deadlines.

Is this place a theme park or a horror house?

Marc expertly perpetuates this duality. He bounds in on your interview day with blue hair and a pair of trousers he appears to have fashioned from a West End stage fire curtain – singing about his network of talented mentors and stories of his student’s successes. He shows you round the studio – there’s someone’s painting in one corner, a pair are fighting over the intro for a film about fish food and one guy is sat staring at an idea he’s stuck to the wall screaming “WHAT DO YOU MEAN!?”

Everyone seems very cool and now you’re excited. You get the interview done on a wave of adrenaline and nerves…

Then Marc sits you down and tells you that you probably won’t get in, and that even if you do, you won’t be able to afford it because the school doesn’t qualify for student finance. He tells you that should you end up getting in, and can somehow scrape the cash together, you risk endangering your social life and that at some point, you’ll probably want to leave. 

Sounds right up my alley Marc, where do I sign. 

This duality is unsurprisingly a bit unnerving. But it’s something I’ve come to realise accompanies any creative endeavour. I’m slowly learning to embrace this as an exciting (rather than terrifying) plane to operate on. Because although being shit at something and making mistakes may leave a couple of dents in your delicate ego, it’s on this echelon between fear and excitement where us humans do our best work. 

It would have been far safer for the Wright Brothers to have stuck to paper aeroplanes, the Shard didn’t have to be so tall and there’s no way David Blaine had to sit in that box freaking kids out for such a long time. But look at them all now. 

And at the risk of losing half the class as potential creative partners with this next line,

I was once told by a Danish guru in Bali….

…that expressions like “you are your own worst enemy” and “there is nothing to fear but fear itself,” exist only because we hold our own world view in such sacred esteem. So between now and the time I start school, I plan to:

1. Detach from my ego (but not to the extent as to become unrecognisable)
2. Save up every last penny I have
3. Learn to relish the process of making mistakes in pursuit of getting better at things
4. Do most of the reading