CREATIVE leadership

“You know what would be a great fit for my skillset?” I was in a weird situation. Wrapping up two years of hard work on what would become an award-winning feature documentary, I was looking for a new challenge. I was also looking to get paid. Two years of focusing primarily on the film had meant that I had largely lost my client base as a freelance director and editor. My wife and I were discussing what should come next. “A creative director,” I said. “But nobody would ever hire me for that position with zero agency experience.”

I was wrong. A few months later, a job offer out of the blue found me performing exactly that role.

Traditional agency CDs are either writers or designers. I was a third kind. Or as I often like to put it, I was the agency’s pet filmmaker.

Within a couple of months of joining the agency, I found myself in familiar territory: the early stages of developing a TV campaign. Having spent many years running my own boutique production and post house, I had done a wide variety of productions for different types of clients. Sometimes I worked with agencies. Sometimes I essentially was the agency, developing creative concepts, writing scripts, and delivering executions beyond the screen.

As we approached this first production, the question was put to me of whom we should hire as the production company. My answer was simple and direct.

“Why don’t we act as the production company?” 

Traditionally, agencies didn’t think that way. Writers wrote. Designers designed. Production companies produced. And agencies … agencied, I guess.

There was a decided financial benefit to bringing production in-house. Rather than paying an outside production company its customary 20% fee, the agency could retain that revenue. Factor in an in-house director/DP and editor, and additional fees that traditionally went to outside vendors would stay with the agency.

Acting as our own production company quickly went from novel idea to standard operating procedure — with me heading those efforts and liaising with freelance line producers who handled all the details. Sometimes I directed. Sometimes I was the DP. And almost every time, I was the editor. Fees captured.

Around that same time, two words rose to the top of every marketing department’s mind: “content” and “storytelling”. Enter the documentarian.

Documentary filmmaking and typical commercial work are very different skills. Due to my history, I had been fortunate to develop those skillsets in parallel. Most agencies at the time thought of storytelling as simple testimonials with a little b-roll. The difference between that and true documentary filmmaking was one of both form and process. 

Commercial productions are typically about two things: schedule and budget. The budget is controlled by the schedule. And the schedule is determined by the budget. That leaves little room for ideas like improvisation, observation, or discovery. Everyone on set knows what’s happening now, what’s happening in 30 minutes, and what’s happening at the end of the day. It’s detailed in the production book. (Or it was when people still printed things on paper.) Every scene, every angle, every line is notated, checked, approved, signed, stamped and distributed in triplicate. Or something like that.

Documentary is different. Or at least, the kind of documentary filmmaking I loved was different. Set a time. Set a place. People show up to be behind cameras. Other people show up to be in front of them. Then … things happen. Sometimes interesting things. Sometimes not. There’s no script, per se. There is simply an idea. And the writing happens after the fact in the edit suite.

I won’t say there weren’t birthing pains. There was some screaming involved. Mostly directed at me. But I was able to bring the loose, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach of documentary filmmaking to our agency world. And it worked. 

Rather than delivering rote interviews punctuated by staged, perfunctory b-roll, we crafted stories with emotional heft. Stories that made people feel something. On more than one occasion, when these stories were presented in our portfolio as part of new business pitches, the prospective clients cried. Openly. There are no metrics for that.

Documentary storytelling has been a staple of our services ever since. And like the medium itself, storytelling is constantly evolving, now taking the form of UGC-style videos.

So, what’s next? What’s the next challenge?

I've spent the last decade finding ways to make an agency think and work differently. Maybe it's time to see what I could do with an entire creative organization.

But nobody would ever hire me for a position like that.

Or would they?