Dedication: Good and Bad

Usually I write about projects that I have completed in the past; what went wrong with them, what went right, or what I learned about myself in the process. In thinking about what to write for today’s blog, I was drawing a blank. Yesterday I spent 18 hours in DC for a shoot and then flew back, and I was thinking instead of talking about a single project, I would write about some of the craziest things I have done for clients throughout the years.

Dedicating yourself to a project is both a strength and a weakness. I have done some pretty “Dedicated” things in my time that I look back on and question what I was thinking. No clients will be named in this blog, as it was ultimately my or my team’s decision to do these things.

In a quick turn around project that had several of us flying all over the world to capture interviews, I was asked to go to Australia. Sound great right! Head out there, work for a day spend some time with some wallabies, who wouldn’t want to go. Well there is a catch. Because of the quick turnaround that needed to be done and the even shorter time frame, I had to fly out the night before the shoot and fly back. What that means is I spent almost 46 hours in the air, and 16 hours on the ground. I spent less time in Australia, then I did in the airport. The worst part, there were no First Class or Business Class seats left on the flight, so I was flying coach. The only wallaby I saw, was at the airport gift shop.

Working with clients on either coast is a challenge that I have grown accustomed to, but for this large webinar I had to work with clients on several different time zones across the globe. We captured footage from several different countries for this webinar video (Different then the Australian one), we shot in several US cities as well as France and Germany. Once the rough cut was complete we sent it out for everyone to review. Normally we give the client 2 days to compile feedback on a working doc and send back to us, but because we were under the gun for the webinar we needed feedback in hours instead of days. Because of the time difference, the feedback started rolling in in waves. We reviewed the feedback and started working. Well as the hours went on, we noticed the feedback never stopped coming in so we kept going. Then it came time to export. Back then exporting would take hours depending on the size of the project and more often than not it would fail for no reason at all. Well with a 2 hour webinar, this was going to take anywhere from 6 - 10 hours of exporting. We set the computer up and came back the next day and wouldn’t you know it, it failed. The client took this as an opportunity to ask for more changes and since one region got to ask for more, the others wanted them too. Well after another long edit day we finally hit export. The estimated time; 12 Hours. But we weren’t going to make the same mistake. This time, we stayed and made sure it exported. 12 long hours of keeping each other entertained, sleeping in shifts, and calling our significant other to say we would be home “soon” was well worth it when we finally got the export. Of course the webinar went off without a hitch and the client was extremely happy but I learned a hard lesson about working with multiple time zones.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from these two projects was to prep as much as possible, plan for everything to go wrong, but most importantly be ready for all of it to go sideways. Production has always been exciting for me because of the roll with the punches kind of attitude I have and in many ways it is extremely exciting. I’ve always referred to certain productions as intricate as pulling off a heist with far less money at the end, but also no jail time. In that vein I leave you with this quote from Flash villain Captain Cold who sums it up pretty nicely;

“There are only four rules you need to remember: make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan.”