Preparing for a live event on set. None of this happened spontaneously.
Why does a person get into media production? It certainly isn’t for the healthy lifestyle. Preparation for live events is a particular kind of madness, consuming irreplaceable days at a voracious pace. There’s no such thing as a normal work day: if you’re conscious, you’re working. If you’re unconscious, you’re probably dreaming uncomfortably about the mountain of things you need to be doing once you’re conscious again.
Nutrition is a problem. Carbs and fats tend to torment production zones, often in large, easily grabbed, mindlessly consumed quantities. Caffeine tempts you like an irresistible seduction; you want to say no, you know you should say no, but no matter what you do its shiny, zingy glint keeps pulling your eye. You drink it, then you remind yourself you could have avoided it. When consciousness requires you again, your day starts with thoughts of caffeine, and that gets you back to thinking about carbs.
Why does a person get into production? It isn’t for the clarity of thought. Even if you’re a visionary auteur, you will encounter hundreds of decisions each day, often piling up in jumbled heaps, each one pulling your focus from bigger, more compelling concerns. As much as you may want to focus on developing a character, defining a “look”, or declaring an aesthetic direction for a team, you will be confronted with an endless stream of challenges that take you away from the essential focus that describes your real intentions. Has someone worked out parking passes for the lighting crew? What’s the deal with shared network storage? Can we reorganize rehearsal times while the construction team tries to get supplies to finish the interior location?
In a best-case scenario, production environments are collegial, shared adventures: buzzy spaces full of motivated people intent on doing their best in service of a singular vision.
In reality, that synergy happens only some of the time. You’re always working on finding a solution. Freelancers aren’t available when you them them. The accounting department threatens to stop working because the production design team keeps asking to hire new vendors. Two of your actors don’t get along with the crew. Your construction lead can’t arrange the set with enough room for your camera team to operate. Someone forgot to plug in a critical battery charger, and now a bunch of stuff must run on wall power for a while.
Why does a person get into production? Why? Why? Why?
One reason has to do with feeling like you’re part of something that could not exist without a team of people working shoulder to shoulder. The work demonstrates its progress each day that advances on the production calendar, sometimes accumulating as footage, sometimes accumulating as better rehearsals, sometimes as disappearing technical barriers whenever the team figures out smart solutions. Productions rise from little more than words and sketchpad doodles. They grow as if they had their own souls, and if you’re a creative person, there’s nothing like being in deep contact with another soul, even if it belongs to the production itself. Production work can turn stacks of plywood, a collection of spoken words, and a few piano chords into emotive whirligigs that appear to emerge from nothing. It’s as if the chaos of a weather front had passed through a crowd of people, its churning winds breathing a living entity into existence. If you’re a part of that weather front, you’re a part of the moment of creation.
Production lures many with its promises of cool enterprise, creative frisson, and sometimes even a decent payday. But don’t kid yourself. The money almost always goes to the top. Each day’s labor will ask more than you imagine at first, and creative experiences usually revert to more work: ceaseless, sometimes thankless, often grinding work. It may be a cool enterprise once finished, but if you’re part of the team that hoed that road, you likely walked miles on weary feet with hardly even a soft place to sit at the end.
But once you experience it done successfully, once you’re been on a team that successfully presented a big story or a bold idea or a new look or sound or narrative message that transcended the mere instructions of the assignment, you’re hooked. You feel it. You’ve been part of a transformative moment to assemble, fabricate, coordinate, and reveal something that simply could not have existed without the collective effort.
Sometimes the result of that effort amount to nothing but a stupid television commercial. Sometimes you’re shilling for a corporate executive who thinks he or she has something important to tell the world. Sometimes the work you’re doing concerns content that means nothing to you.
But the work itself is about you. Others rely on you and you rely on them. The quality of what you do matters to the quality of the whole. You get into production work because one day in your own past you decided that you don’t do what you do without a personal investment. What you do defines who you are. It’s hard, it’s inconvenient, and it often asks a lot of everyone involved. But if you care about your craft and have even a smidge of positive regard for your colleagues, it’s ultimately the act of doing the work itself that matters most.