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Entries in The Music Bed (4)

8:00AM

TMB - Tips for Interviews

Since launching the Music Bed Community, we have interviewed dozens and dozens of filmmakers and artists from all around the world. We’ve flown to Paris. We’ve Skyped to South Africa. We’ve GChatted to Spain. And during all that time, we’d like to think we’ve not only gotten better at interviewing people, but that we’ve learned a few practical lessons along the way. We’ve written them down here.

Before we get into it, though, just a quick note about why we’re so into interviewing in the first place. It boils down to this: We think what other people have to say is oftentimes a lot more interesting than what we have to say. Given the choice between talking about what we know about filmmaking and hearing what Eliot Rausch knows about filmmaking…well, the better option seems pretty obvious. We interview because we’re curious, because talking to amazing people opens up our minds, surprises us, challenges us — and honestly, it’s usually a lot of fun.

The types of interviews we lean toward (and so, the types of interviews the lessons below are relevant to) are usually a bit more rambly, the kind that take twists and turns, that unfold, that linger a little longer on a subject than people otherwise might. In other words — they’re conversations. And while there is certainly a time and place for a more straightforward Q&A kind of interview, that’s not the type of thing we get very excited about.

Here’s everything we know about interviewing...

Make Your Subject Feel Smart

Great interviews happen when the people you’re interviewing feel confident, when they feel like they’re saying intelligent things and you’re genuinely interested in what they have to say. In some of our best interviews, we hardly ask any questions at all. Maybe four or five questions total over the course of an hour. A good interview/conversation should roll like a boulder, with you just course-correcting here or there to keep the thing on track. A bad conversation is like you trying to push a boulder up a hill. Zero momentum. A lot of times this lack of momentum comes from your subjects not feeling confident about what they have to say. They answer in a word or two. They, “Don’t know.” Suddenly you find yourself doing most of the talking, trying to put words in your subjects’ mouths, and leaving with nothing. 

Go out of your way to make your subjects feel smart. Ask them easy questions at first (we usually spend a good five minutes talking about where the subjects are from) and be very interested in their answers. Affirm them. Just simple enthusiasm for their responses can go a long way to opening them up, making them feel comfortable — “No way! You’re from Long Beach?! I grew up in Long Beach!” or “You know, I never thought of it like that.” or “You know what, that’s a really good point.” The better your subjects feel about themselves, the better your conversations will go.

Let Silences Get Awkward

There is a natural human tendency to fill silences, to keep conversations moving forward, to do anything necessary to keep things from getting awkward. When you’re interviewing someone, silence can feel particularly devastating. It’s tempting to immediately step in, ask another question, make a comment — move things forward. But this is the wrong thing to do. After someone has answered a question, let her answer hang for just a few seconds too long.

Let the silence linger. What usually happens is the subject speaks up againShe fills the awkward silence, and she fills it by reaching a little bit deeper into her answer, saying something she might not have otherwise said. Be patient. Wait for those moments. Often the thing a subject fills the silence with is a unique and much more personal observation than her initial response.

We love how Philip Bloom opened up in our interview with him in 'Making Room'.

...(read the fulll article here)

8:00AM

Tony Anderson

All I can say is wow! This is great advice for each of us to consider.

Even if you're not a composer, Tony has a whole article full of wisdom that I highly recommend.

"Essentially more content is being made than has ever been made before in the history of the world. And more tools are available than ever before. And there’s more entitlement than ever before. And when you combine all three of those things, you don’t get art. You get “almost-art.” You get a lot of people who’ve experienced very little pain, very little loss, very little depth. You have a lot of people — and I fall into this category, by the way — who start caring more about being successful, or appearing successful, than they care about making music."

Read it here.

8:00AM

Creating Authentic Marketing 

(This is an excerpt from The Music Bed Blog.)

Tom Aiello and Daniel Chesnut (otherwise known as Process Creative) are breaking a lot of rules. While most marketers would tell you people have just 30-second attention spans, Tom and Daniel are creating branded narratives that are often 10 times that long. And while most marketers would tell you it’s all about the product, Tom and Daniel say it’s all about the story. “Mostly we try to create marketing that would work on us,” Daniel told us. “And for us, we want marketing that feels like a gift.”

We recently sat down with Tom and Daniel to talk about their video The Encounter Collection, their creative process, and what it means for marketing to have a soul.

Here’s Tom and Daniel.

TMB: So, together you guys are Process Creative?

TA: Dan and I started the company. Originally it was just a passion project. A friend of ours, Stephen Kenn, designs furniture, and we wanted to tell an authentic story about it. So we did a passion project, not really thinking anything of it, and it turned out really well. We got a big response from it. We decided maybe we could start a company doing this. Actually, we didn’t want to start a company, more of a collective — just a way to tell cool stories — and then it developed into a business. We’ve been riding that wave ever since.

TMB: What’s your guys’ background?

TA: We’ve been doing films, separately and together, for six or seven years now.

DC: We met while we were working at Hurley and Nike. Back in the day, we worked on their production teams doing in-house commercial stuff, telling stories about their athletes, a little bit of everything. Then I went freelance, and Tom stayed and did tons of awesome documentary-style stories. We reconnected a couple years later on that piece Tom mentioned earlier. It was just a good time to come back together, and it blossomed.

TMB: How did The Encounter Collection piece come about?

TA: Actually, that was Stephen Kenn again — the guy we did that original passion project for. He’s one of the most inspirational dudes you’ll ever meet. Every conversation with him turns into a story. That “live life to the fullest” idea just oozes out of him. The Encounter Collection film was inspired by him. It’s very much about who Steve is and who his dad was and who his grandfather was. Each generation took each kid on a trip to become a man. We took that idea and wrote a rough treatment. We always leave a lot of room in our treatments to be creative later though.

TMB: I’m curious to know your process — how you arrive at a treatment in the first place.

DC: It’s different with every client and every project. The Encounter Collection project was unique because Steve has a story behind every single product he makes. He literally won’t start a project unless he has a purpose behind it. He comes to us and expresses that purpose.

So our process for The Encounter Collection was basically Steve coming to us and saying, “Hey, I’m going to do a bag collection and here’s why.” And that purpose for this particular project was to leave a lineage for your child. He wanted to create something that was worth passing on, something you could build memories with. You could share stories of your time holding that bag, taking that bag on a trip, what you put in that bag, what you use your bag for. He wanted to create a product that was worth keeping.

The three of us literally sat in a room for half a day, talking about our relationships with our fathers, our memories, our stories. Those conversations turned into five different concepts, which turned into five more, which we then boiled down to one.

TA: Usually with our treatments, we try to create a story around an individual. We write a story without even knowing if it’s true or not. And then we’ll call up the person and say, “Hey, would you ever do this? Is this true?” A lot of times they’ll be like, “Yeah, I actually do that,” or sometimes they’ll say, “No, that’s not really what I do, I actually do this.” So we rewrite the treatment to fit that.

We like to create emotive stories around someone’s daily life, but stories that are also intentional about showing why people live the way they do and why this certain product fits what they’re doing.

DC: One thing we take pride in is being able to create a narrative feel within a documentary environment....Read the full article here.
8:00AM

Production Design

(This is an excerpt from The Music Bed Blog.)

If you’ve seen anything Khalid Mohtaseb has ever done, you know that his work is consistently, mind-blowingly beautiful. The guy is practically a legend. So we were surprised to hear that his secret isn’t some obscure lighting technique or a particular piece of equipment, but rather a person — Joseph Sciacca to be specific: a production designer.

After he started working with Joseph, Khalid hardly needed to light anything at all. Because Joseph was creating such beautiful environments, Khalid just had to point the camera and start shooting. The secret, it turned out, was creating something beautiful to shoot in the first place.

Khalid and Joseph have collaborated on projects for clients like National Geographic, Everlast, and Toyota — just to name a few. But even after all these years and high-profile projects, both of them insist they are still just learning. “Every job is homework for the next job,” Joseph told us. “Life is homework.”

Check out what Khalid and Joseph have to say about production design, lighting, and how $20 of tar paper can change everything.

KM: One of the first things a cinematographer should ask themselves when they walk into a space is, “How do I create contrast?”

 I learned this four or five years ago when I sat in on an interview with Jack Green, an AFC DP who’s shot for Clint Eastwood. I asked him what the most useful advice he’d ever gotten about cinematography was. He said that when you first walk into a space, the first question you have to ask yourself is, “How do I create black?”

I didn’t totally understand what he meant [at the time], but he was essentially talking about contrast. How do you create contrast? It’s the concept of negative fill: putting black into spaces. So if you’re shooting in an all-white room, find the edges of your frame and put black there so light doesn’t bounce everywhere. What a lot of beginning cinematographers don’t realize is that light is bouncing everywhere all the time, and you don’t realize it until you start trying to create black.

For this Everlast scene, we were in this all-white room, and there was no way to create black.

JS: The quickest solution for finding black in that location was to black out the floor so we didn’t have all that light bouncing off the tile. I drove to Home Depot and grabbed some roofing material. It’s like tar paper. It’s got this fantastic non-reflective surface and it’s relatively seamless. That’s where having experience with hands-on work — masonry, carpentry, things like that — really pays off for a production designer. You need to know what tools you have out there.

KM: We put this stuff on the ground, and when we looked at the scene again, it was the most drastic difference ever. We weren’t getting any bounce off the floor. It created this moodier look, and the actor’s face was almost silhouetted. The lighting was coming from one side but didn’t bounce; there was no fill whatsoever. And that was it. That’s what we ended up going with. We just put a small light through a window, which created a really interesting look. I think the whole fix cost us $20.

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