Last weekend we where invited to the Art Film Fest in the idyllic spa town Trenčianske Teplice in Slovakia to give a masterclass about Creative Producing and present two cases that showed the creative involvement of a producer in the process of initiating, developing and producing a media project.

We where asked to focus on the basic drivers behind a producers role and involvement as well as sharing our own experiences. The masterclass started with the statement that most of us actually dont even know to define a producer. What is it a producer does? Because a producer needs to be an entrepreneur, financial and legal specialist as well as creative, social, stimulating the team’s energy and creativity, understanding story and cinema, coaching director and writer, facilitating the process and so on. A producer needs not only to include organization, planning and financial control, but also creative aspects that affect the final result —like the concept and the script.

Ideally a producer has to be both a financial and a creative producer and where it comes to a creative producer, we should make a difference between being a creative (not to confuse with creator, which means fathering a story and characters from scratch) and producing creatively. The last is ofcourse expected from every producer any time, because thats what producing is all about anyway: finding creative solutions to get your film made. But we think a producer has to be creative himself to: being able to initiate ideas, to read scripts and collaborate with the director and writer throughout the whole project. Because film, as opposed to many artforms, is a collaborative art. In that sense, I think the collaboration of director, writer and producer needs to bee seen as “collective authorship” and “collective expressiveness”. In that respect, we see director, writer and producer as a creative triangle, the three creative pilars for a filmproject.

Furthermore, we defined several basic drivers for any creative producer. Passion, curiosity, experimenting, daring, energy… simple words, big actions and essential if you want to produce original and extraordinary stories.

We shared two cases with the group: finished feature film ‘Club Zeus’ by David Verbeek and project in development ‘I Dream in another language’ by Carlos Contreras. Both projects (ideas, stories) came into being through close (creative) collaboration between director, writer and producer. More info on how we produced Club Zeus can also be found here.

A big shout out to Marta Lamperova and her team for the excellent time we had and for inviting us to the festival!

Below the presentation at Slideshare: