[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: I believe something you’ve said to your students is ‘Story always comes first.’ What does this mean to you?
Andrew Zinnes, Author/Senior Teaching Fellow/Script Doctor: Right. I think if we work in the industry this is a very common thing. This is not some genius thing that I’ve come up with.
Where it comes into play often, and it starts at beginner level is, people often get enamored with the cameras or the microphones or the special effects or the stunts or whatever it is that looks fun when you get on the set. All of those things are in service of something else. They’re all incredibly amazing crafts and the people who do them are wonderful crafts people with so much skill and artistic talent (makeup, props, editing, whatever it’s, composers) everyone all lend a hand in but if you don’t have a great story they can’t do anything right. You can’t even spend money from finance, here you need that script and the only way that script gets made is if the story and everything that we’ve been talking about here in this time works properly. It’s difficult but that’s where you need to be spending most of your time.
When I have film students, they don’t really want to hear stuff like that. Well, that’s not fair, maybe they haven’t thought about that. I think when they’re quite young they just think Oh, cameras and lights and microphones and actors and…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
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About:
Andrew Zinnes is Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He has worked in development at Paramount Pictures and at USA Networks. He left to become a script analyst, and worked for Morgan Creek Productions, Artisan and several script analyst companies. Using his documentary filmmaking experience, Andrew was the perfect co-author for The Documentary Film Makers Handbook. He has taught documentary at the NY Film Academy and has lectured on filmmaking at schools and colleges around the US. He is a founding partner of the film company Crazee Pictures.
CONNECT WITH ANDREW ZINNES
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