Scale What changes when a project gets bigger (and what shouldn’t) - Lessons learned moving between indie, mid-scale, and larger productions. Scale is one of the most important concepts to understand, not just in business, but in storytelling. It has been expressed in many ways over the years, probably most clearly in Tom Hardy’s observation: “there is no difference between a five-dollar performance and a hundred-million-dollar one—it is the work that matters.” At the creative level, this is...

Taste and Talent Taste and talent are skills - and they can be trained Early in our forays into the industry, some of the best advice we received was simple: go out and see things. Watch plays, films, television, commercials. Visit galleries. Experience other art forms. It was emphasised as being just as important as learning the discipline of acting itself. Part of the reason for this advice was to challenge a persistent myth—the idea that taste and talent are innate, that you either have...

Seeing Process as a Creative Tool Not a Constraint It's often the case that those on the business side of a project wish the creatives would just get on with it and have a finished product ready to take to market. And those creatives on the other side can see process as an obstacle to getting to that finish product. For everyone, process isn't the obstacle. It's the thing that protects the work and the upside. Across every discipline — writing, directing, acting, producing, design — the same...