Companies are filled with stories that advance their goals or hold them back. The messages that don’t work are typically not simplified so the company’s audience can understand their story and its value. Or, sometimes, the story is understood, but not its value.
As a director who consults in the corporate sector, I’m often called on to streamline complex messages into something that can sell and educate.
While there are many tricks learned from experience, there are a few things each employee can do to help their customer understand their story and its value to them. Here are the three steps for employees that are easiest to implement.
Listen Attentively
When your competitor has an opportunity to listen to the customer, they listen through the filter of how they can angle one of their solutions to meet most of the customer’s needs. They are more about winning than building the relationship through effective answers that help.
To truly serve the customer, the employee has to listen to “why” there is a need. Listening carefully will also give the employee an understanding of several “whats” and “hows” the customer may have already explored. These give the employee clarity on why the customer has a need, the steps taken to date in search of an answer, and why the current answers won’t work.
This information positions the employee to guide the customer into being their own hero.
Float the Ideal
Based on what was learned about the customer’s journey, the employee can suggest or test out what the ideal solution might look like. When floating an ideal solution that may or may not be possible, the customer immediately knows if the employee truly understands the need and the direction they are interested in heading.
No matter how good the listener, the customer usually corrects certain aspects of the ideal. This might be due to the employee missing something, or the customer realizing after hearing the ideal solution, that they want something a bit different than they originally thought. The employee can alter the ideal and float another possible solution.
Focus on Gains, NOT Gaps
After understanding what the customer’s ideal solution looks like, the employee can now determine what products and services the company offers that can give specific gains to the customer. It is critical that the employee also mention what they can’t specifically address in the ideal solution. These gaps can be used for future discovery with the customer and the development of new solutions.
Also, by being upfront with the customer about the gaps, the employee is given more trust, which will help with upselling and any future solutions. Most competitors won’t be honest about the gaps and try to pull one over on the customer, hoping they’ll forget the stunt when future needs arise.
Too Close to See the Big Picture
When employees listen, float ideals, and focus on gains, the customer is endeared to the employee. This empowerment will position the employee for great success. However, not all employees understand the value of their role or know how to adjust for faster growth.
Should an employee be too close to see the big picture and is therefore unable to adjust their next steps, bringing in a director to simplify the message is prudent. Directors are observant, understand the human condition that drives decisions, and are experts at crafting simple messages that will help your audience understand your story and its value.
In summary, the company that educates its employees on the above three steps will see an increase in revenue, trust, and understanding. Training costs are minimal, and the benefits far exceed the revenue that a simple message can drive.
I was recently asked by a newbie filmmaker how he could become a great director. The answer I shared was a quote.
“Contrary to popular belief, filmmaking is not a job. It’s not really even a career. It’s an Artistic Lifestyle! And that means in order to work at your art, you will need to live and breathe filmmaking every day.”
Director Peter D. Marshall
Having communicated with Peter several times, I came to understand and agree with his perspective on this answer. Below is my understanding of his answer in seven easy steps that will turn any filmmaker into a great director.
Study the Human Condition
Directors are observers. They watch others attentively and learn why they do the things they do. Directors also compare people’s actions to help them understand how we are the same, and different.
Marshall defines the act of directing as “the art of visually telling a compelling story with believable characters who make us feel something.”
To entertain a person, a director must reveal something that the audience has never experienced before. To make them feel something, the director must navigate or direct the audience through new experiences. And, to empower the audience with the theme, the director must inspire them to rise from the human condition with hope for their tomorrow.
Studying the human condition is the most important task of a director. He must understand, not judge, everyone around him. This is something that needs to be practiced daily.
One approach is observing normal people living through normal conditions. By witnessing their behaviors and choices, you can learn what motivates people to do the things they do. Understanding motivations give the director a great tool for working with actors to achieve realistic performances.
Study the Storyline
Directors must know the story better than anyone else on set. Instead of focusing on cool effects or cinematic compositions, the director must ask himself how each tool, crew, and cast member adds to the story. This is where the details count.
The director must do a deep dive into each scene, character, and setting. He must know the why behind every action, comment, and motivation. He must know the backstory prior to the script’s first page, and he must know the proverbial pages that follow the final “The End.”
All productions are forced to make changes during the shoot and post-production, which can turn a good story into a disaster. However, changes at the hand of a director who has studied the story to great depth can ensure a successful outcome. There is no shortcut to studying the storyline. The director must own the story.
Direct the Performance
Every actor I’ve worked with needs a director that fits their style. This is only possible if the director learns various acting techniques and develops listening skills. Directors also must learn the best ways to approach various actors and communicate what they need to hear in order to alter their performance for the positive.
This actor/director relationship is critical to the show’s success. The most important element of the relationship is trust. Actors must be able to trust that the director is not going to have them looking bad on screen. This trust is also a form of protection for the actor, who must make themselves vulnerable in being someone they are not.
Good actors surrender to the in-the-moment feelings and impulses of their character. The director must make the set a safe place to keep the actor’s emotions intact. To do so, they must praise great performance often and workshop the differences when the story needs the character to address the scene from another perspective.
Understand Editing
When reviewing a script, a director can make better on-set choices if he takes the time to read the script from an editor’s perspective. This empowers him to make more visual decisions from the standpoint of cutting between shots and camera placement—not to mention camera movement.
By learning how editors think, a director can better block scenes, create montages, and capture natural movement with the characters. This skill will also help the director to get to the point of a scene when in a time crunch. This also improves the director’s use of dolly, trucking, and crane shots.
Learn the Psychology of the Camera/Lens
Directors who have worked on the legitimate stage seem to have a better understanding of the camera and lens as compared to the theater.
For instance, when a director moves a character downstage toward the audience, it’s like using a telephoto lens to capture an intimate close-up. The opposite is also true. When a director diminishes the character by moving them upstage, away from the audience, he can accomplish a similar effect by using a wide-angle lens that reduces the character on screen.
The composition also plays an important role in the psychology of the image. The on-screen character can be dramatically and emotionally impacted in the audience’s mind based on their angle and placement. This is more than memorizing the name of shots, as the composition can convey a wide variety of emotions.
The director must learn where to place the camera in order to make the audience feel in a specific way. A poorly placed camera can take the audience out of the story and force them to realize they are no longer involved in a story but rather watching a movie—killing the hard work of the cast and crew.
Explore Blocking Techniques
Not only do various lenses play a big role in the look of a film, but the position of the actors to the camera also plays a significant role. The director’s blocking techniques impact the relationship of the actors to the camera. This “choreography” of actors, bits, and extras creates a harmony of movement that is believable or not.
The director that decides to be artistically random doesn’t understand what the audience requires for believability and to understand the story. Blocking should never be done without the audience in mind. Plus, the direction shouldn’t be so things look good on set but instead look good through the camera lens.
Blocking is often deciding what to exclude from a shot or how to focus the audience on a specific thing/moment. It’s the technique that allows the director to limit the audience’s gaze to what they need to see and understand to advance the story. If the blocking takes away from the audience’s emotional experience or understanding of the story, it must be re-blocked.
Focus on Production Value
All too often, directors pay little attention to production value. They forget the importance of Sound, Cinematography, Set Dressing, Props, Editing, Visual FX, Costumes, Stunts, etc. All these elements play a huge role in the audience’s believability in the story. When any of them are missing, audiences can sense the film is a “B” level film.
When I shot Mystery at the Johnson Farm, I met with several other independent filmmakers. We all got together for a weekend and took turns showing and critiquing our films. It became obvious who had a solid budget and who had to cheat, except for my film. Everyone thought I spent a couple of weeks shooting on a real farm, but the truth is that not one single shot was taken on a farm.
I shot a few blocks away from a downtown suburban area just outside Chicago. The choice of camera angles, sound effects, foley work, and ambiance made the audience feel like they were on a farm. To sell the feeling, instead of using the standard four soundtracks typical of an indie pic at the time, I used 16 tracks. The layering made a subtle difference that few could speak to, but they were all convinced the film was shot on a farm.
Closing Tips
The biggest difference comes not from the director’s skills but his self-confidence. He must have a positive mindset, a relentless creative style, a passion for expression, and make choices based on his genre-based taste. Also, maintaining a high level of passion for the craft will always add the right amount of polish to any project.
Film editing has come a long way since the days of silent films. From the early 1900s, when movies consisted of a single, uninterrupted shot, to today’s fast-paced digital world, where films can be edited on a computer with lightning speed, the art of editing has changed dramatically.
Silent Films
The earliest films were shot with stationary cameras, which captured the action from a fixed position, like watching a play. There were no close-ups or camera movements, and the films were edited by simply splicing together individual shots in the order they were shot. The editing style used was known as “continuity editing,” which is still used today.
D.W. Griffith, the director of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, was one of the pioneers of film editing. He used the technique of “cross-cutting” to create tension in his films. For example, in one of the most famous scenes in The Birth of a Nation, he intercut between a chase scene and a family in distress, which increases the intensity of the scene.
As films became more popular, filmmakers began experimenting with different editing techniques. In the 1920s, Soviet filmmakers developed the concept of montage, which involved editing shots together to create a new, meaningful sequence. Montage was used to great effect in films like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), which remains a classic example of the technique.
Classical Hollywood
During the classical Hollywood era (the 1920s to the 1960s), film editing became more refined. Directors like Alfred Hitchcock used editing techniques like the “Kuleshov effect” to create suspense and emotion in their films. The technique is where a shot of an actor’s face is intercut with various other shots to create meaning. Hitchcock used this technique in the famous shower scene in Psycho to create tension and fear in the audience.
New Hollywood
During the 1970s and 1980s, a new era of filmmaking emerged, known as New Hollywood. Filmmakers could now edit their films on a computer, which gave them more control over the editing process. The development of non-linear editing systems, which allowed editors to rearrange shots in any order they wanted, made it easier to experiment with different editing styles.
Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather was a masterpiece of film editing. The film used the “parallel editing” technique to create a sense of tension and anticipation. In one scene, we see the baptism of Michael Corleone’s son, intercut with a montage of murders that Michael has ordered, creating a powerful emotional impact on the audience.
Scorsese’s 1980 film Raging Bull used a unique editing style known as “intensified continuity.” This technique used shorter shots and faster cuts to create a sense of energy and urgency. The film’s fight scenes were edited chaotically and viscerally, which made them feel more real and intense.
Digital Age
In the digital age, editing has become even more complex with computer software and advanced special effects. This allowed filmmakers to create complex digital effects and compositing to manipulate footage in ways that were impossible with traditional editing techniques.
Nolan’s 2010 film Inception used a unique style of editing that played with the audience’s perception of time. The film’s dream sequences were edited in a non-linear fashion, creating a sense of disorientation and confusion. In his film Dunkirk, Nolan used three different storyline time periods (one week out, one day out, one hour out) that he compressed for parallel action.
Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network used editing to tell the story in a non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth in time. The film’s editing helped to create a sense of tension and drama, which kept the audience engaged throughout the film.
The Future
From shaping the narrative to creating emotional impact, film editing is a vital part of the art of cinema. With the widespread use of digital technology, editing has become an even more sophisticated art form. Editing is the tool, coupled with music, that allows the director to emotionally touch the audience.
CJ's Corner 