I own a creative agency, which has gifted me the experience of creative directing for over 350 brands, learning how to hire and run creative teams, employ people in two offices, and frequently have giant conversations with CEO’s and marketing managers about what the hell we are all doing here anyway. I learned how to buy commercial real estate, design and build an office, and create a culture that housed some of the most talented, creative people I’ve ever met. (I also learned how to evaluate the basic business structure I was following and blow it to smithereens. More on that another time...)
I started it all from an old laptop, and when I really stop and think about how many people I have employed, projects we have imagined and then brought to life, and businesses we have helped, it’s remarkable.
I don’t often stop and think about it, though. When I’m at work, I work.
Last week, I stumbled across a folder among hundreds of Dropbox folders in our company files. This folder contained behind-the-scenes (BTS) content from my team. It went back for years. It was from their phones or our company cameras. There were still photos. There were video files. It was raw and unfiltered, full of sound bytes containing laughter and snippets of conversations with each other. There were a laughable amount of photos of me sitting on the ground in weird places, staring into a director’s monitor, totally unaware that there was a world outside of the one we were making. There were photos of work trips, hotel rooms, scooter gangs, and trade shows. There were shots of my dog sleeping at the feet of his favorite designer. This was our life. I can look at the beautiful, professional portfolio of what we made together, our “body of work,” but these folders show the soul of our work. I almost cried.
If anyone who has worked at Wheelie is reading this, they’re probably like, “Duh, Lisa. We’ve been doing (or did) this for YEARS.” It’s amazing. I never just click around in Dropbox, and finding these images that showed everyone’s perspective of a work day- their lens of what they saw on a commercial production or event- made me stop and feel so damn grateful.
I love BTS content. I always have. It’s where all the magic is.
Sure, the end product is gorgeous. There’s a final shot I love of a dirt biker at sunrise, dust sparkling in all the right places. It’s epic. It’s aspirational. It’s rugged and badass and everything we’d hoped it would be when we wrote the storyboard.
But it doesn’t show the stories.
It doesn’t show everything that went into making that shot. Meeting at the office at 3am to beat sunrise. It doesn’t show the hours of planning and booking athletes and grocery shopping and filling coolers full of food to keep the crew going for a 14-hour work day. It doesn’t show the meetings with clients, the way creativity feels when it hits all at once when an idea lands in a human body, and the meeting room full of creatives deciding if this idea is The One we want to rally around. It doesn’t show the laughter, the coffee, the contagious yawns, the mud, the charging of batteries, the local knowledge of where to hide our trucks to keep them out of the shot. It doesn’t show the drone crashes it took to fly so well now. It doesn’t show the high-fives when we get the shot. It doesn’t show the hours of music selection or the piles of snacks in the editing bay. It doesn’t show any of that.
That’s the good stuff.
That’s the stuff I’m obsessed with.
Making things with people is one of the things that adds the most meaning to my life.
I think how we get the shot is better than the shot itself.
The messiness of the process of making things is something I embrace. Who cares if the sun flare came from a mason jar taped to a tripod, tilted into the lens juuuust enough to be perfect instead of some fancy filter? Who cares if the athlete in front of the lens was one of our best friends instead of someone vetted by a talent agency? Who cares if we couldn’t control the weather, but we could figure out how to work with that one pocket of light popping through the clouds? I’ll claim it right here— in writing— that our work is amazing. The end result is often even better than how we plan for it. I think the secret to that is putting the right people in the right places and letting them be brilliant and creative and do what they do so well. That’s my usual approach as a creative director. To direct, not control. And to love the process.
The magic of BTS applies to most things in my life.
I can appreciate the process of the gourmet dinner I just made. When I hand someone a plate of food, they usually don’t see me at the grocery store still in my snowboard boots a few hours earlier. They don’t see the mess in my kitchen and the dirty dishes in the sink. They don’t see my dog trying to steal cheese from the counter and me chopping veggies, still in my outerwear and mismatched socks. They just see the text that says, “Hey, dinner’s in 20 minutes” and the meal I managed to put together after a day in the backcountry. (On that note, I don’t see the BTS of what it took to get butternut squash from a seed to a squash to a store. The process of that alone is amazing.)
I love the BTS of snowboarding with my friends. In the present moment, I see my friends charging hard, playing, jumping, sending, hiking, moving like experts in their craft of sliding on snow. I don’t see the shitty jobs it took to originally afford this lifestyle, the years of crashing and learning and getting up again, the hours spent in avalanche safety courses, or the coordination of spouses to watch the kids for a few hours so friends can snowboard together at this exact moment. Honoring the quietness of the BTS makes meaning out of our lives, even something that might seem so quotidian, so mundane as spending a few hours together in the mountains.
I try to be gentle with my judgments of people, knowing that I’ll never see the BTS of what got a stranger into the exact moment we are sharing together. I’ll never see the BTS of why people in my life are the way they are. I can ask all the questions I want, but I’ll never truly see things they have seen and experienced things they have experienced. Life shapes us. These things matter.
I suppose it’s a good way to frame comfort in the process instead of a destination, but what feels truer for me these days is acknowledging that loving life’s behind-the-scenes gets me stoked on pretty much everything.
The human experience is extraordinary.
I love sharing it with you all.
Here for it,
Lisa