Zack Morrison looks through the camera lens while filming. The 21-year-old Rutgers student will be showing a film at the Cannes Film Festival this summer. PHOTO COURTESY OF LARRY McALLISTER EAST BRUNSWICK — For East Brunswick’s Zack Morrison, an upcoming trip to the 2013 Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, this May can be traced all the way back to a Christmas gift he received a decade ago when he was in the third grade.
“I loved building with Legos — I had billions of them in my room,” Morrison, 21, said. “One year for Christmas, I got Steven Spielberg Legos where you build a movie set. It actually came with a little video camera that allowed you to shoot little Lego movies in a little made-up Lego world. It was so much fun; I fell in love with it right away, and I’ve been playing with cameras ever since.”
Morrison brandishes a wide array of skills — he’s a volleyball player, a lover of the outdoors and he can play a halfdozen musical instruments — but his years of experience toying with his Steven Spielberg Lego set have made him particularly deft when it comes to real-deal filmmaking.
He said the idea to make a career out of his hobby kicked in during his years at East Brunswick High School (EBHS).
“All through middle school [my friends and I] were always screwing around with cameras and some basic editing. In high school I started doing more video work for different class projects, and I started to learn how to really shoot and edit. I always did the sports highlights for all of the different [EBHS] sports teams, and started building up a résumé to go to film school and shoot as much as I possibly could,” Morrison said.
In his senior year, Morrison and a few friends wrote a short narrative film called “Writer’s Block” for an annual class competition.
“It was the final project for our humanities class. You go through high school hearing about the short films and how awesome they are; I wanted that project to be the pinnacle of my high school experience,” he said.
And it was. The film won the EBHS film festival.
“That’s what really did it for me,” Morrison said.
Now a junior at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Morrison is spending his undergraduate years working hard toward a double major in journalism and media studies and filmmaking. Because Rutgers does not offer a filmmaking major just yet — Morrison says a handful of professors have it in the works for the near future — he is pursuing his filmmaking major as an individualized study.
Since entering Rutgers, Morrison has churned out a handful of award-winning films with his friends, including 2012’s “Knights, Tigers, and Cannons, Oh My!” A documentary chronicling the historic rivalry between Rutgers and Princeton University, it took home Best Documentary honors from the Mason Gross School of the Arts.
“Most of what I do can’t be done without all the people that I work with. It’s very much a team effort,” he said. “I physically direct and work the camera, but a lot of the hard work is also through my friends at school.”
Another Morrison & Co. comedic short, “Don’t Make Me Sing,” won last year’s Campus Moviefest. According to its website, Campus Moviefest is the world’s largest student film festival and a premier outlet for the next generation of filmmakers. Students who enter the film festival are charged with making a five-minute film short during a one-week period.
“Don’t Make Me Sing” was subsequently nominated to be screened at the renowned Cannes Film Festival in France from May 13-27.
“We’ll be in an exhibition showcase in the short-film corner,” Morrison said.
In his senior year at Rutgers, Morrison said he plans to apply to a master’s filmmaking program at New York University or the University of Southern California.
“Ask any filmmaker where they’d want to study, and those are the two places you’ll always hear,” he said.
An enterprise that started with a Lego set is now culminating in a life’s purpose for the young East Brunswick man.
“I want to make films that are relatable to people and, most importantly, to entertain. I love making people laugh. I love seeing smiles on their faces as I share parts of my life on screen,” Morrison said. Contact Tom Castles at [email protected].