We recently connected with Zane Berry and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Zane thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parent’s are both artists, my Dad a bronze sculptor, and my Mom was a photographer. They both encouraged us to fill our free time and boredom with drawing, and making things as kids; which is very lucky considering most people aren’t encouraged to do art at all growing up, much less taught that it even has value. I think everyone is creative and would find it cathartic to express themselves through drawing, writing, or even fashion or cooking. My parents teaching me that art and creativity is some of the most interesting and fun stuff the world can offer, while also taking it off a pedestal by encouraging it has made me lucky enough to never second guess dedicating my life to creating things.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m filmmaker who makes a lot of very different things from short films, music videos, animations, video essays, and podcasts. I’m building towards directing feature films, and creating a cartoon, but before then I want to make sure I’m always working on projects I actually believe in, no matter how small or low budget, or off the beaten path is. You can find my work on Tall Skeleton the youtube channel. I just always want to move on to the next cool thing, so if that means I need to direct one video, shoot another one, and then learn how to animate for the next then that’s dope. I just want to work with my friend’s to make dope stuff I’d want to watch, and I know if we do that other people will too.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

There was an article that said “the arts contribute $763.6 billion to the US economy—4.2 percent of the GDP—more than agriculture, transportation, or warehousing.” Philadelphia also has more murals than any city in America because they allowed graffiti artists, criminal or not, to work with the city, and paint buildings. This has made property value there go up quite a bit. I think cities should open more opportunity for artists to meet each-other by having a hub where artists can work and meet, like an arts center with a drawing room, a computer bay, a green screen and production room. Offer discounts for minors, have experts on staff to help teach people software. I think if the city used their budgets to help fund this so it wasn’t as dependent on profit to keep a place like this open, it would be a good investment in the future, because you’d foster more young people who believe they can carve their own future, and it would give troubled people a new outlet, and place to go if they were alone, lost, or scared of home. —
Finally I think if there was a well made citizen app with sleek UI that was made for hosting local artist’s work and services, you could save on unnecessary global-shipping, buying pop-culture stickers or shirts, if you found out someone in your area made similar products themself. This would also save some artists from being on social media so much. The more I think about it this is a similar vibe to how they use smart-phones in Animal Crossing.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Watch “How to Learn: Pretty Much Anything” by Mattias Pilhede, I go back to it regularly. To learn filmmaking, animation, or graphic design just go to Youtube. Learn from Corridor Digital, Ben Marriott, Every Frame a Painting, Cinematography Database, Like Stories of Old, DSLR Guide, Blender Guru, CookeOpticsTV, Rob Ellis.
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Outside of tutorial channels, I think interviews offer a lot of perspective that you can’t get anywhere else. Podcasts, 30/30 interviews, etc. can give you good insight from artists you like. Also movie bonus features, and behind the scenes. The making of “her” short film is amazing and very inspirational.
Also unrelated but I recommend Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Contact Info:

• Website: zaneberry.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tallskeleton/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tallskeleton
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tallskeleton
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC27aesMk67JOfqEaWT0Lj5w
• Other: Podcast: https://anchor.fm/zane-berry

Image Credits
Zane Berry