Why Business Owners Are Their Own Worst Enemy on Set

A lot of the time, business owners make creative decisions for our creative teams. That is not the right thing to do.

Business owners try to decide for themselves what story is worth telling and what should be shown on camera. And almost always, they are incorrect.

The reality is that business owners are too close to the subject to make an educated determination. They think they know whether it's good to show the office the way it is, or the warehouse, or the restaurant, or the manufacturing floor. Because they are so familiar with these things—or because they have their own specific hang-ups about how something looks—they try to dictate the visual narrative.

They don't realize that as creators, we are able to frame a restaurant, a dish, an office space, an interaction, or a process in a way that makes it look far more appealing, dramatic, and important than it actually is in real life.

Movies Are Fake. Video Is Fake.

The movies are fake, and video, to a large degree, is fake too.

We curate exactly what the eyes see. We use depth of field, lighting, framing, camera height, color grading, and the temperature of the lighting to direct the viewer's focus. We use all of that to invoke emotions—to trigger the mind and the heart to feel a certain way about what they are being shown. All those feelings get tied to the imagery and the story we are telling.

That is the power of visual storytelling. It's a big deal.

But when business owners make the decisions of what is to be shown based on their own uneducated perceptions, they cut off their own production value.

As a commercial filmmaker, I am coming from the outside in. I am learning about your business from an outsider's perspective. I know what is actually appealing to a viewer. I know what makes the company look more relatable, more professional, or shows that you have grit and resolve.

By making that decision for us, you limit our ability to do that for you properly.

The "Fun" Trap

I think the real crux of the problem is that somebody writes a check for $10,000 or $20,000 for a shoot, and they decide they want to have fun doing it.

It is fun to shoot video. It's fun to be on set. But they don't have the hours, days, weeks, months, and reps of making over a thousand videos for clients, corporations, and organizations. They don't have that experience.

So now you have a brand-new driver who's got their hands on the steering wheel and their feet on the pedals, and they are refusing to defer to the expert sitting next to them.

They don't realize that by deferring to the expert, they are giving the shoot the best possible chance of becoming successful. That's not to say we don't want to collaborate—collaboration is a part of the entire process. But they are in no position to challenge our expertise.

If we make a recommendation or a suggestion, it's the result of years of experience. A lot of the time, I end up having to fix problems in the editing bay based on decisions made by non-creatives on set. I have to work overtime to make their shitty ideas more palatable just to make the video work.

And even then, it's still not the most optimal version of the story we could have told.

It is difficult to get a founder to realize that they are the ones standing in the way of their own project. But if you want the ROI you paid for, you have to get out of the director's chair.