Nicholas Z. Scott
Nicholas Z. Scott is a Shanghai-based filmmaker and film educator. He’s taught film and screenwriting at NYU Shanghai, the Shanghai Vancouver Film School, the University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong Joint Institute, and Tulane Global. His short films have won awards at the Shanghai 48 Hour Film Project, the Shanghai International Short Film Competition, and the Shanghai International Film Festival. His films Requiem for a Martyr and Detaching were both screened at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the 48 Hour Film Project’s “Best from Around the World” showcase.
Check out some of his award-winning short films
Understanding Values, The Building Blocks of Modern Story Structure
The greatest advancement in the understanding of narrative structure in the last fifty years is value-based storytelling. Yet, most filmmakers aren’t aware of these advances or aren’t yet comfortable using value-based storytelling in their own work. The goal of this talk is simple: to help filmmakers of all levels understand values, the most essential pattern of effective story structure.
But great films don’t reveal their structures easily. The best screenwriters bury their stories’ values as deeply as they can, striving for subtlety and the thrill of audience revelation. In this talk, we’ll discuss how to recognize key value turns across beats, scenes, sequences, and acts, and how consistent value turns build dramatic tension, reveal depth of character, and craft powerful endings.
