Creative Production: Guiding Artistic Endeavors (transcript)

Rebecca Olsen: We're problem solvers. So every situation we deal with, we have to come up with solutions. And notice I say solutions, not a solution. Because to be collaborative, you need to give people options and make them feel part of the team to solve a problem.

Host (Wesley Slover): This is the Collab Collection, where we collect stories and useful insights about creative collaboration. I'm Wesley Slover.

Producers are the organizational backbone of video post-production and motion graphic design. Since they're uniquely positioned to facilitate collaboration between creative teams and the clients those teams serve, I wanted to understand what makes an effective producer in order to be a better creative collaborator myself.

So I reached out to a pair of experts: Rebecca Olsen and Dr. Casey Warren. Rebecca has years of experience producing for some of the biggest studios in the business, and Casey's background is in teaching and philosophy. Their company, Deducers, offers teaching and coaching to producers. I think producers can be misunderstood; their role is more behind the scenes, so their contributions might not be elevated in the same way as others on the team. Here's Rebecca.

Rebecca Olsen: Some creatives see producers as an assistant to the project to make sure notes are being taken, schedules are being sent out, and tasks are being distributed. It's so much more than that. I've worked on projects where the creative team wants to have the producer go away so they can talk about creative and set the plan. I understand why, because you don't want a producer saying, "no, you can't do that".

But everything funnels through a producer. The producer literally needs to be involved in almost every single conversation with the client and the team. Producers are stewards of the project. If there's any problem whatsoever or any question that needs to be answered, the producer holds all that information.

We are also project managers, looking at what resources are needed—whether it's people, software, or vendors—and setting the roadmap. We need to be business-oriented because we're negotiating every step of the way, with the client and the team, to get to the end product. Sometimes we're even therapists; we have soft skills where we're in it with the team and the client, knowing when things are hard and helping everyone get through it together.

Host: To teach this, Rebecca and Casey use several metaphors, but my favorite one is that the producer is a guide. I think of this like a mountain guide who knows the terrain and makes sure the group is moving in the same direction toward their goal. Here's Casey.

Casey Warren: The guide is going to be there to advocate for different people and to serve different people and make sure that their needs are all met. A producer guides when receiving feedback from the client. Because they are the front line to the client, they need to guide them through the process and educate them at every step.

Rebecca Olsen: There's so many times we get feedback from the client that is just a massive paragraph of garbly goop and it doesn't make any sense. We have to take that, decipher it, and go back to the client to clarify things before we even give it to the team to eliminate frustration or confusion along the way.

Host: Rebecca gave me an example from creative director Ed Ryan, where a client asked for something to be "gold but not gold". I have no idea what this means.

Rebecca Olsen: If I just pass this on to the creatives, they would be like, "Are you kidding? I want to leave the building," because that's a ridiculous comment. What I would do is take a bunch of different screenshots of gold and ask the client, "Can you tell us which of these you like? What direction do you want to go in? Can you elaborate on that?".

Host: The guide understands ambiguity and navigates that with their team and their client. Casey brings some experience to this challenge from her background in academia.

Casey Warren: When I taught philosophy, one of the things we taught is that ambiguity is all over the place. You can have words with different meanings, and people can have different associations with them, which makes for chaos if you aren't clear on what is actually being said. If you gain that clarity by opening up a conversation and realizing they might be coming from a different perspective, it's easier to get the train back on track.

Host: Filtering feedback is an important part of keeping things on track. A big pet peeve of mine is when a producer just forwards a client's email directly, where remarks might come off as condescending or offensive even if they weren't meant to be.

Rebecca Olsen: We're filtering that information, sticking to the facts, and making sure the team is getting the relevant information. To be collaborative, you need to give people options. I'd say it's like negotiating with sugar.

Producers have to know when clients or the team are in the wrong, but they can't be blunt about it. They have to negotiate with sugar on top because they need to win the sentiments of both parties to keep things moving forward while sticking to the contract. Usually, this works, but if you cannot come to a resolution and figure out a path forward, you stop down.

You literally have to stop if you're burning through the budget. If there is conflict on the team or someone is hijacking the project, you speak with that person to get to the bottom of the issue. If it continues, you remove that person from the team and replace them, because our job is to advocate for the team and client while protecting the studio as a whole.

Host: I come away from this conversation with three things a producer does as a guide that I could incorporate into my own creative practice: being empathetic, building understanding by distilling communication to facts, and fostering cooperation by negotiating with sugar.

Rebecca Olsen: I think the thing that we all need to remember is it's not us against them. We're a huge team trying to get to the end goal. Just like any other relationship, it is about communication, negotiation, flexibility, and adaptability. Otherwise, nothing's going to get done.

Host: This episode was written and produced by me, Wesley Slover, with help from Jake Merritt. It was mixed by Trevor Richardson. Our artwork and branding was created by Audrey Haby. If you have any thoughts on collaboration, we would love to hear from you at the collab collections.audio. The Collab Collection is a project of Sanctus Audio. Hear our work at sanctus.audio, and if you could use a sonic collaborator, hit us up.