Edinburgh Napier University

  In most if not all national contexts the work of the ‘creative producer’ is essential to both the art and business of filmmaking. Yet the creative producer’s role is perhaps the hardest, if not impossible, to properly reproduce in the film school context. The required alloy of creative and entrepreneurial skill can only truly be forged where and when the art of film-making is tempered by the business of securing both finance and an audience for the work.
I have no doubt that it is well understood by teachers and by students that, in film school, ‘producing’ is largely a matter of production management, of ‘line producing’ and that at the end of the day it is the director’s and not the producer’s film.
While this is as it should be for the director it does leave us with the problem of how to provide producers with the full spectrum of professional skills and experience. If the art of producing is expertly leading the creatively true, commercially astute transformation of material, talent and skills into a complete, finished work, a work that can reach its intended audience, how can we cultivate that art in a context where the director is leader, the commercial dimension is hypothetical and the audience is a secondary consideration to a complex set of pedagogic aims?
In this presentation I aim to reflect on some of the issues we have faced during our first five years offering specialist post-graduate programmes to would-be producers.