1) Search for balance – yes, you need to be your own best advocate for your vision, but you also need to take on board the advice and guidance of trusted colleagues and peers. You need to choose work that speaks to your personal taste and style, but you can gain a lot from jobs that enable you to get some good reps under your belt and push you to collaborate and execute against a budget and schedule.
2) Align yourself with producers, networks, agencies, brands and/or studios that have terrific reputations and do the type of work you see yourself doing. Don’t make long term decisions for short term money – when you’re young and you commit to a project for a long period of time (early in your career, a 9 month project is an eternity) it should be with an eye to working with people you admire, not chasing a paycheck. But, hey, if it’s a two-week gig and you need to pay the rent, by all means take it!
3) Of all the things that can push you out of the business, few are as inexcusable as refusing to adapt alongside innovation. With one of our most recent series, Abstract: The Art of Design, Netflix asked us to deliver the series in HDR. It forced us to reconsider everything from camera and lens choices to our graphics package and completely changed our post-production and finishing workflow. Everyone learned on the fly and we made creative decisions with imperfect information. Production isn’t about waiting for optimal conditions or perfect understanding of every variable – you prepare as thoroughly as possible and go for it. Rely on your fundamentals, and find a way to make the technology service the quality of the final output—if it’s not making the work qualitatively better or cheaper/easier, why are you using it? In our case, HDR gave the show a unique visual identity that helped us show off the work of our subjects in a more honest way—it doesn’t get much better than that.
4) You love them all in their own ways. But someone who knows me very well recently told me that Abstract: The Art of Design was “the most you thing you’ve ever made,” and I take that as a profound complement.
