Given China’s rapidly growing movie business, students from the Shanghai Theatre Academy traveled to New York Film Academy for a Producing Workshop, which consisted of one week at the New York campus and one week at the Los Angeles campus.
“The producer is the spark of the creativity in filmmaking,” said NYFA Senior Executive Vice President, David Klein while introducing the students to NYFA’s Producing Workshop. “If you don’t have a strong concept of how the story will be told, budgeting and preparing the numbers for the project will become extremely challenging.”
The workshop provided an overview of what role the producer plays on a given production, with a strong emphasis on budgeting and scheduling in Movie Magic. Classes within the workshop also included Film Financing, as well as a Directing Class in order to have a filmmaker’s perspective on the process of filmmaking. “I always look to my director as my partner,” said NYFA NYC Producing Chair, Neal Weisman. “It’s my job as a producer to put the director’s vision up on the screen.”
Students also learned best practices for how to pitch their projects and, very importantly, where to find the money and how to control the project’s risk.
“We have learned much and experienced the well developed producing system in Hollywood, said Shanghai student Hongyu Liu. “Thank you very much!”