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Communicating Your Vision & Expectations

I want to talk about production and production protocols will go back. We're gonna go back. Teoh are slides in just a minute. I want to talk a little bit. First about in general to set the big picture in that in a production matter what size of production you're in. It's really important to understand about leadership in hierarchy. So I've been encouraged to tell a story. So when I went on to Team Marco with Giulio, I've been involved in a lot of the production planning before. We hired a crew, so I was deeply involved in the creative. I was deeply involved in the fundraising. I was deeply involved in the formation of the company, but my crew didn't know that they just knew I was any P. And as an executive producer. Ah, lot of times crew members don't interact with executive producers because you're really far up on the food chain. And I didn't understand that my presence on set every day was really unnerve ing for a lot of those people because they realized that I was guy cutting chec...

ks and I was a guy that was at the top of the production and on the mast head of the company. So it's not usual for somebody in that position to be actively involved on set. Now, of course, my background as a photographer and as a person who spends a lot of time on set was sort of lost on them because they're not in my world. They just knew me in that role, and I needed to understand something about my role and leadership and having to incorporate things that I know how to do on a set but also make these people feel comfortable that I wasn't either going to judge the way they do their job or get upset with people, or that they need to tiptoe around me because I don't operate that way anyway. I don't want anybody on a set regardless of what position I'm in, but I'm used to being the leader on a set of used to being the photographer. I'm used to being the director, and I'm also used to that people understand that that's the role I'm in. But this was different because I think that the expectation off what people know of executive producers on films, I was not that guy and I was way too deeply involved in stuff that was happening on a day to day basis on set for them to be comfortable. So I had to take a step back, huddle with my team off people who knew me and understood what I did and figure out a way to make the other people on the set comfortable with my presence there. And a lot of that had to do was just talking to them and just showing them that, Hey, I got things I want to learn from you to is like I am from this world. I am now in your world and I am here just to help. I'm here to help in any way, and I wanted to be able to make them understand that I was trying to provide leadership and I wanted to provide assistance. But I didn't want them to feel uncomfortable with my presence. And that is something about the learning curve of being in a different environment that has a very rigid structure. And I talked about the rigid structure off filmmaking right before we broke and his reasons why these things work because knowing what to expect in any given situation is really important because when you walk into any situation, even like when your parenting, your kids, if you're inconsistent, then their behavior is going to be inconsistent. So in any leadership role, if you are consistent and you communicate what you need going forward and what your role is going to be and how you're gonna behave, then everybody starts to get comfortable with your presence there. And then they come to learn to lean on you when they need you, and then they understand that your skill set is something that can bring value to their job. So I wanted to say that up front because the idea of me putting people at ease is a way to get maximum production out of people. So the other thing that I want to talk about in terms off leadership, hierarchy and the big picture is about communication, because I think that it's very hard for, particularly for photographers, because I experienced this on so many levels with my peer group of photographers. Is there the photographers, you know how to talk about their own work and then they're they're photographers who have no clue as to how to talk about their own work. And when you get into that category and then you want to become a filmmaker, you're at a huge disadvantage because you have a very hard time articulating your vision. But it doesn't mean that it's impossible for you. For some people, it's much more normal and natural to say, Here's what I intended to do and this is the picture I made and this is how I made that picture. And these are the things that I had to do to make that picture. That for some people is very natural for other people. It's a struggle because, personality wise, it's just not how they operate. But that doesn't mean you can't be calm a successful filmmaker, because you don't have that personality trait. But what you do need to understand is that communicating your vision to other people sometimes requires that you speak a language that they understand, or one that your Comore comfortable communicating. So I'll give you an example. Words are tough for some artists, right? Some people don't have the communication skills to articulate their artistic vision, but a mood board goes a really long way, and I think that when you have a tendency to be somebody who thinks or talks or communicates in pictures, there's no reason why that you can't do that with the team you're assembling to help you execute a project and in video project or film project, there are a lot of elements that go into how you do that. So maybe you don't know how to communicate that you want a particular color scheme and how that color scheme is gonna play out over time, like what we talked about in those earlier slides. But what you can do is create a Pinterest board off all these different pieces and parts. So, for example, when Julie L and I were working together early on, I didn't quite know creatively how we were gonna work together. We were new to that part of it. We had a long term friendship, but we didn't work together creatively on that level, and I had no idea how he worked. And then he provided so much information on so many different levels, like all those charts that I showed you. But that wasn't it. It was more. There were all these mood boards and all of these pulled images and scrap and all of this stuff just to kind of continually hammer away it. This is my vision. This is my vision. If you don't understand my script, maybe you understand my charts don't understand my charts. Maybe you'll understand my Pinterest board if you don't understand my Pinterest board, you know, and on and on and on. And he just kept layering it on and layering it on until everybody who was on board about how they like to communicate, understood the vision completely. And that, in and of itself is a gift when you're a creative, when you're working with all the people that the person who is at the top of the food chain is able to communicate to you in a way that you understand what they expect of you. And I think communicating expectations is, the other part of that leadership role is that in order to execute your plan, it's really important that you have the means to do that communication, you have to give yourself the opportunity to communicate those things, those people so that everything comes together at the end. So, um, I know that the idea of communicating your vision as an artist sometimes becomes challenging. But by putting people around you that share your vision as well so that when you're looking for costumer, we're looking for a production designer looking for a DP. You're looking for people who share your aesthetic, so it's not a simple issue just plucking people off the street. You're actually pulling in people who have common traits to your artistic vision and people who you admire their talent or you admire their work, and then you can communicate on that level. You know that picture you made that you Well, you remember that film. I really love that film that you made one of the other things that we did, which I thought was super helpful. And this was, um, driven by both the director and the DP were we got a list of reference films to watch. We're watching this film for the cinematography. We're watching this film for this production design. We're watching this film for the performances, and all of a sudden a picture starts to emerge of what a each of these people are thinking about and what they want out of this particular project. So when we're talking about the visuals, we were talking about this one movie, and, of course, it becomes an inside joke and people start to bond around it. That Oh, yeah, you're just making the metal and shot again or something like that, right? But the reality is that when you start to do it that way and you use this common reference points, it makes the entire process flow that much better, so that by the time you actually get on the set, everybody understands what the vision is. And if you move off the mark a little bit, everyone else is there to push you back onto it. Because there's no outliers. Everybody's on the same page, and I think that being able to utilize all the skills in your tool bag to come to a project and build the team that you want is all about communicating the expectations of what you want people to bring to the table and how you're gonna help them get there. And that's the idea of a collaborative process and filmmaking and in video, because it's very, very hard to do alone. So you have to be able to trust that other people are going to be doing that. So before so all of those elements were put in place, and then we had a lot of meetings, and you sit down and you get people together. And if you can't put them together in the same room, you put them on Skype or you have a conference call and you look your materials on the computer and you collaborate, Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate, Lee, until you can't stand collaborating anymore cause all you want to shoot and then all of a sudden it becomes automatic bang, bang, bang. We know exactly what we want. We know exactly where we're putting the camera. You know exactly what the costumes they're gonna look like. We know what the hair is gonna look like. You know what the makeup's gonna look like. And we had moments like that in filmmaking, you have moments where somebody comes on set and their makeup is all wrong, and you say Okay, well, that's not what we're talking about. Let's fix that. And then once you fix it, now, all of a sudden we're back on the same page again because everybody wants Everybody knows. Well, no No, no, no. That's not how we want that character. Go back to makeup, Fix it, Come back, You know, So all of those things is all about communication is all about expectations, and it's all about understanding that as the leader, you need to communicate to your team what you expect of them before they get there, and that's it. It's not brain surgery at all. It's just about finding new ways to communicate what it is you want to say to both your audience and your crew because you can't speak to your audience. If you can't speak to your crew, you just can't. So what? That one on a T shirt, right?