Transcript
Chris Doe (0:00)
Hey, everybody. Chris here, we're trying something a little bit different than what we normally do for the podcast. We're doing solo episodes. These are shorter, more contained, built around certain themes and questions I think are very relevant for us to be talking about. So wherever you're listening to this, however you're seeing this, let us know in the comments and the feedback what you think, and we'll make some adjustments. Foreign I'm going to begin this episode with a metaphor. Be bamboo, my friend, be bamboo. Bamboo grows fast, is very flexible, and it's super strong. When we're talking about clients, you're going to run into a situation where you're not sure if you should go against what they asked for or if you should comply. If you're a younger creative, you just think automatically. The answer has to be go against the client because they don't know what they're doing. And you do at the ripe old age of 22. Let's think about that for a little bit. Most of the time, I'm going to tell you this. You're in the service business, and the only way that you have business is to be of service to your client. You have to understand they're not interfering with your art, you're interfering with their money. You have to really think about this. They afford you the life that you have, the ability to live and express yourself creatively and pay rent, buy food, and save money for a rainy day. A lot of creative people mistakenly believe themselves as artists, where you have a patron who just pays you to make whatever it is that you make. And oftentimes when the client's asked to, I don't know, make the logo a little bit bigger or to move things around, you have an adverse, negative emotional reaction to it. And what happens then? And you don't know this because clients are pretty good at hiding their emotions. They just say to themselves when they get in the car, never again. And whoever hired or recommended Rich or Chris, they're dead to me at this point. So not only have you burned that relationship, you burned the person introduced you, which is an irresponsible thing for you to do. That's why when a client asks me for referral, I'm very careful as to who I refer them to. I want to make sure they do good work and they take good care of them because now my reputation is on the line. It's something that many people don't take into consideration because you're living in your little bubble of designery and you think this is what it's all about. Now I'm going to give you some real life examples of when it's good to bend and when it's not good to bend. We'll start first, like when it's good to bend. Oftentimes we work with clients who have extremely good taste, who have great ideas and understand their clients really well. And they challenge us. They say, you know what, those ideas are great, but how far can we push it? And that gives us the kind of confidence to say, like, you know what? Most clients rein us back in, but this client in particular is pushing us to go crazy to push to find the edges of what they think they can sell to their client. And those are dream relationships. And we found that if you have an open mind, many times those relationships bear the best fruit. Like you do work that's better than what you could normally do because the clients pushed you, they gave you room to sort of hang yourself. I mean, if you wanted to, you can go and create some pretty crazy things. And oftentimes creatives, we do that, we give them that extra mile because they said, you know what, push it, let's go. And we'll spend more money, more time, more resources, trying to find the edges of our creativity. And that's a good time to bend to the client's wishes. Many years ago we were shooting a commercial for Audi. It was the introduction of the A7 in Europe. It's a brand new debut of this kind of hot, fast, four doors sedan that was like very coupe, like in its design sign or coupe, as they say in Europe. It was beautiful and the budget was tight. We could not rent a technocrane. We could not rent a camera that was controlled with motors that we can repeat certain motions or it wasn't stable. All we could afford was a crane, which was handheld. And we're trying to pull off a very precise shot and to keep focus and to keep the shot stable and is the very difficult thing to do when you have humans involved. And so what ultimately happened was we got the footage back and my visual effects supervisor looked at the footage and said, it's kind of unusable. It's unusable. So what he had to do was he had to take frames from that camera, move, break it apart and photo map it back onto a 3D CG car. It's called photogrammetry. To create a photorealistic version of it that wound up taking a lot of time and energy. He said that it was not necessary for us to shoot it on a jib arm. If we couldn't use a Technocrane.