“Everyone has a story; how will you tell yours?”

This question has followed me throughout my career as both an educator and filmmaker. I believe students learn filmmaking most effectively when critical analysis and creative practice inform one another. Learning how to operate a camera, edit a sequence, record sound, or light a scene is important, but technical proficiency alone does not make someone a filmmaker. Students also need to understand why they are making those choices and how those choices shape the way an audience experiences a story.

For that reason, film analysis is not separate from filmmaking in my classroom. When we examine a scene, I ask students to move beyond whether they liked it and identify the choices that shaped their response. Why was the camera placed there? Why did the editor cut at that moment? What information does the soundtrack provide that the image does not? How does lighting direct our attention? How does a genre convention create or disrupt an expectation? Students develop a vocabulary for understanding cinematography, editing, sound, performance, genre, and production design and then use that vocabulary to make and defend decisions in their own work.
 

One of my favorite examples comes from an editing lesson in which I showed students two versions of the same scene I edited from identical source material. Instead of simply telling students that editing changes meaning, they could see how shot selection, timing, juxtaposition, and structure fundamentally changed their experience of the story. One student later described the lesson as “revelatory” and told me it was something he expected to carry with him to film school. Experiences like this reinforce one of the central principles of my teaching: students understand filmmaking most deeply when they can observe a concept, analyze how it works, apply it themselves, and reflect on the result.