Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Also, in your field that you say, OK, I need this programmer with this designer and together with them and the right vision, we can build something. I think it’s very similar with film production. We all work at the end of what’s possible, and we want to go beyond.

00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Maximilian Becht of Cosmovision.

00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hi Adam. Nice to meet you.

00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And Max, I know you just got back from a pretty intense film shoot. Tell me about that.

00:00:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m just back in Berlin. I was shooting for 30 shooting days. That’s like a little bit more days all around it because we had 6 weeks of prep and 6 weeks of shooting and now 2 weeks of. Post production for my production team. I was a production manager, shooting theatrical movie in southern Germany and this was my rough summer and yeah, I’m looking forward to be back in Berlin and have a good conversation with you today.

00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the intensity of these shooting schedules. I used to live in Los Angeles, and had a lot of friends that were in Hollywood, and I think sometimes it’s nice to have sort of an intense work period, but then maybe a longer break in between, but it often was quite surprising to me. Puts even the intense work schedules of Silicon Valley, gives it a run for its money, you might say.

00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I think for the last weeks, my workdays had around 12 to 15 hours and the weekends were not really weekends. So it’s like a vacation camp. This filming feels sometimes like this sprint. Maybe you can compare it to the tech industry when you really have this one project, this one program you want to finish and you really give every effort and After it, you feel it drops sometimes in like an emotional hole because you’re way, there’s something missing. I have to be working right now, not, so you were always wondering, oh yeah, what’s happening.

00:02:20 - Speaker 2: Actually I have very strong memories of my first experience of exactly that drop, which was in the video game industry at the beginning of my career.

And we were just working these, yeah, basically every waking moment for weeks on an E3 demo, so E3 was the big conference, you gotta have a great demo, and I remember when we finally, well, we shipped it because E3 happened, so there was no more time.

After that, I just didn’t know what to do with myself for a day. I couldn’t remember what my life was like when it wasn’t just nonstop working, not a great place to be. But in a way, it had its moments, maybe because I was sort of young and had no other responsibilities in my life.

00:02:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m always reflecting on that part, whether how much energy and, yeah, you put into your work. And with film, it’s always because it’s a passion thing for most of the people I know, that way it’s hard to divide it strictly between your personal life and your professional life because you always do it out of a passion, out of the lust to really create awesome images, awesome films.

00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely a problem we have in the software world as well. So Max, you’re a video producer or a film producer, I don’t know exactly how you title yourself, but tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into this field.

00:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m a film producer. I would specify it more as a creative producer because I like to create a content and develop content together with someone, but also have the production side in my head to know how to finance a product, how to organize the product, and how to really finish it in the end.

But the part at the beginning where you develop a story where you imagine ideas, where you Look for a concept that’s the part I like most about filmmaking.

I, after my A Levels, I had some years of internships with production companies and working on sets as a runner, set runner, you are on a film set and see that all the infrastructure is working well. You run from the set to the base to get a cable or something or to grab a coffee for some important person. But that way you learn the infrastructure, the how film work, how every department has its purpose on the set. And then I applied for film university in southern Germany at Film Academy, uh, Baden Wittenberg. It’s a very renowned film school and yeah, I studied 5 years of film there. I produced several short films, mid-length films. With different formats like starting with uh fiction, also documentary, but also I got glimpses into animation, visual effects, and interactive storytelling. And now I’m back in Berlin and I have my own company, my own office, and I work as a freelance producer for other companies, but also try to develop my own stories together with writers, directors, and I offer my services to companies who needs a sparing partner to produce and develop content.

00:05:40 - Speaker 2: And I’ll link folks to your portfolio, there’s quite a diversity, as you said, there’s, including these short fiction films, you could say maybe high concept or things that maybe submit to film festivals, that sort of thing, very artistic, maybe those are more labors of love, and then you also have things that are maybe more commercial in nature, so there’s quite a variety, although my feeling and maybe part of why I was drawn to it and we’ll talk soon about how it is that we came to work together, but it seemed like a lot of your work, whether it’s maybe fiction isn’t quite the right word, but a story versus documentary, it seemed like you really focused on the people, the characters, showing their lives, their environments. It feels like that’s a, it’s quite a theme, but at least I saw that across your portfolio, but.

00:06:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, always people ask what kind of films you like to do, but this question is hard for me to answer because there’s no genre I would like to be in or just one field, like I’m just a commercial producer or I just do documentaries or nature films.

My engine for motivation for filmmaking is always the story and what is behind it.

Like, for me, a story has to make sense, has to have an impact and has to be of a topic I find of relevance. So there has to be some kind of political or I would say, the value which a film contributes or puts to the screen that has something I share.

And at the same time, film can be an experimental way of pushing boundaries in fields you also find interesting or getting into topics you don’t know anything about, but you want to learn more about.

So I give one example. For example, I am producing a documentary about prison television station in a German high security prison. So I don’t know anything about prison. I’m lucky to not have been in one yet, but I was really curious how criminals Live in German high security prisons and how is their view on media and how do they consume media and what it would be if they produce an on television channel.

So, this changed my perspective. on how we in a society want to handle people who don’t follow the laws. And if you have been in a prison, you know what it’s like to be in there. So that’s a reflection I find very valuable for me.

00:08:19 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is filmmaking, perhaps obviously, and there’s two reasons for this. It might seem like a bit of a non sequitur compared to our usual world of product design and having ideas and so on, but There’s 2 layers here, 2 reasons to talk about this today. One is I’m really interested in the creative process.

Generally, I read a book some years back called Making Movies. I’ll link that in the show notes. I’ve even mentioned here before maybe, and I was really struck by how much similarity there is, not on the practical level of what you do in terms of how films are made. Shooting and getting actors together and things versus writing code, but that there’s a lot of similarities between making great software products and making films, where they have this pragmatic aspect as well as this artistic aspect as well as this team aspect. And so I thought it would be really interesting to dig into the creative process there and find those parallels. But the other reason is that we are doing a little experimental, let’s say a little launch of a small film project. That you and I worked together on Max along with a couple other folks on our film crew, to create a sort of mini documentary series about the creative process. So, just to briefly speak to that, that’s called Create. And I’ll link the launch memo, as well as the pilot episode here, and you can read all about why we wanted to do that, why we think that’s really relevant to Muse and our mission, but I thought it would be great to talk a little bit about the experience of working together on that and how we ended up at this final result.

00:09:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I was kind of surprised to be contacted by you because you’re an American company and I’m here.

Upcoming film producer, I just finished my study two years ago and building up my portfolio and I was not actively reaching out to people, but I’m open for, because I’m always also busy with other projects, but I find your reaching out to me very interesting because your product was something very cool because I use productivity apps myself as well and I’m not an iPad user, so I didn’t know Muse, but as I think I got a, a fast idea what it was about, and I was thinking to myself, OK, what kind of content would you want or need? Did you want something animated to like show what your app can do best? And I was Very happy to see that you wanted something bigger or wider than that. So that stands more for the core values or ask the question about what Muse stands for and how does branded content work? Because I share the idea that a good commercial is not always showing all the benefit of a specific product, but to Show what it stands for or what the idea is behind it. And I thought it was very powerful to search for creatives and people who have very unique ways of working and their own way of productivity and where do they have their source of, yeah, structure of energy, of creativity.

00:11:47 - Speaker 2: So it’s just a tad more context. I think what we wanted to do here, you mentioned the term branded content, which I think is kind of a film concept that I guess there’s what you would call traditional commercials, and so those are usually sleekly made, they’re usually 30 seconds, and they show, maybe there’s something clever or funny, but they show really directly.

Here’s this product, it exists, here’s why you might want it, you know, linked to a place you can download it or buy it or whatever, and those are fine. Certainly for the Muse brand generally, but also for me personally, I saw a more interesting opportunity, or at least for me more compelling than a classic advertisement was instead to take what we had learned through interviewing with really hundreds of creative professionals in our research lab days and now thousands that we’ve interacted with, maybe tens of thousands through our support channels and try to tell their stories. Cause it really struck me that, I mean, use exists because of this research that we did, of going to people who make things, create, call them knowledge workers, I usually go with creative professionals, but think people who make things and inspiring things to me, and try to understand how they work, and in particular, we, we narrowed in on the ideation process, that early stage is something that’s not really well supported by computers, and this is why Muse exists. And so the contents of those interviews, those early interviews are things that are all now essentially baked into the product, all the insights we got from those interviews. But as I speak to people individually and feel inspired by that, again, now just kind of through supporting our product naturally, but even if I flip back through the old interviews and review them, and I think there’s some amazing stories here and some amazing creators, what’s another way that we can share that stuff and film seemed like the right media for that.

00:13:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we are also still on the journey with the product because at the beginning, we said, OK, let’s talk to one or two people and we find the right one and we’ll do one shooting day and then we have our product.

Then on the way, we saw that we have to meet so much more people, have to prepare, like we have to get to know them a lot better before really deciding on.

They are the protagonists for our shooting day because we have just one shooting day. That’s a budget wise restriction or also, I think for this format, 5 minutes, 1 shooting day should be enough. And we have to kind of know the script before we shoot. So the script and a documentary portrait may seem kind of OK. This does not make sense, but It makes sense in a way that we need to know before what kind of facets of a specific person we want to show, because I think everyone has so much interesting stuff to tell, but for us and for this product, we need to condense it and also we need to find visually compelling situations that are not just someone sitting in his flat and talking to the camera, but also doing something and That with, I think a lot of your users are not people who build something with their hands, but also are programmers and people who have very static work environments, but they have also sites in their lives which are visually interesting if they do sports to clean out their head or something like that. So we had to find that with the protagonists.

00:15:26 - Speaker 2: Yes, so for me it was surprising that how much of your time, and particularly how much of the director, that’s Marcus Hannaish, how much of his time, and the cameraman, how much of their time was this, I guess, scoping locations to shoot, they would have things that were visually interesting, so that we can better relevant to the story that we want to tell.

So, clearly you got these protagonists, as we’re calling the subject of the film, they do inspiring work and you see that in the end result, but how they do that work doesn’t, I don’t know, if you’re filming athletes, for example, that’s a naturally very dynamic thing, or they’re out in nature or whatever, so how do we make visually interesting film out of this, and that was a big part of the film based or the visual storytelling that for me was totally new.

00:16:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is a good bridge to tell something about, because I’m the producer of this product, but this film was made with a lot of effort of Marcus, the director, and Jasper, the cameraman. And we also had more with our sound designer and music composer. So I wanted maybe to share something about how this team came together because my process from starting at the beginning was to propose several directors to you because I thought it would be interesting to get Different ways of thinking how this format could work. So I looked in my bubble kind of what are the directors I know or I heard of which are interesting.

00:16:59 - Speaker 2: In the tech world we’d say your network.

00:17:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in my network.

I just didn’t find the word but yeah network bubble, yeah, and I contacted them and I pitched the idea and then I wanted them to not know everything about our product, but to come up with something, a visual world, storytelling, a kind of a style. Even if it’s kind of similar, every director has its style and he has work he can show which reflects the style, but he also can look for skills for images which could go in the direction of what we want to produce and You liked what Marcus was doing and that was a very good coincidence for me because I worked with him before on a short film and also with the cameraman. So we were a good team already because that’s also a very big thing in film industry is the creative trust. That we know how the other works and what the other needs for his work, how much time and how much feedback and how much input a director and a cameraman need and how a producer can work with them. It’s always new to find out and every relationship is so different, but this was very good for me and I think for the product that we already knew each other and knew how to Work together.

00:18:25 - Speaker 2: Creative trust is absolutely something that’s necessary in making great software products as well. I mean, I think part of why certainly Mark and I are working together on this venture as well as Julia. We had all worked together before, we know we work well together and when we had a new product we wanted to pursue through a new venture, you could say we de-risked, but you’re just excited to work again with someone that you know you have that working chemistry with.

One interesting piece of the story here as well is it should be noted that of course we’re not a venture funded startup with a lot of money to spend on some kind of slick production, so we were looking for something we could really do on a shoestring budget, and I had kind of assumed we’d be able to, or what I was looking for actually when I went searching was someone who was kind of all in one, right? Someone who could film and produce and do the software editing and I don’t know, we could talk about some of the software tools after effects and That sort of thing if we want, but that exists now, particularly with the YouTube world of things. There are people who are all in one, and of course, if you’re a generalist, you can’t be great at each individual thing, but you can make something pretty solid. And you, when I approached you and said, I like your work, and you pitched me on, look, we can get a crew, probably helps a lot that we’re here in Berlin, which increasingly does have a pretty impressive film scene, I think a lot of things like Queen’s Gambit was shot here, a lot of other Netflix films, some of the Apple stuff like the foundation series. was shot here, but also probably in general, just wages overall are sort of a bit lower than they would be in, I don’t know, let’s say California. And so all of that means that probably we can shoot. More cheaply than we would in other places.

But you convinced me, look, I think you’ll be better off with the crew. I can get a crew together, we shoot it in one day, we can do it on a budget that’s within reach for us, and the quality and the professionalism and just the power of the story you can tell will be much better, and I was compelled by that, which is why we went forward with that.

00:20:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a big strength of mine is when I can tell it like that, that I have worked in so many different fields of work from a documentary style, really a one or two film team to a big set of up to 100 people.

And each product in the end was good, but you have to find out what is necessary and what it means. And I think there’s a difference between the One guy who films, does the concept, edits, of course, he can do with a budget of something.

For him, it’s so much more, but he does not have the reflection with someone else to really come up with a high concept and a high visual concept.

And if you put together director and cameraman, even those two people, they work and discuss a visual style for this product. And if you put in A sound designer and music composer, you have someone really taking care of the sound level, which often is falling under the table.

But for me, it was pretty clear, OK, we need someone like that to, because we have a small production crew, the sound will be kind of rough, recorded. We need someone who cleans it at the end and to just a little bit of sound design, mixing and composing. So we have audio that you really Like and which has a production value in the end.

Film is doing art. Also, if it’s for a company or like for a brand, it still is an artistic way of working and of course, you could have find someone who really sees it as just the product, but for me, even so, it’s always searching for an artistic, unique piece and not something. Which repeats something already, which already exists. I like to really create and that’s also the title of this, create something new, which each piece I do produce and collaborate with others.

00:22:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this idea of creative energy is really important, and it’s one of the reasons I was so excited about this series.

We’ve talked on this podcast before about how creative or entrepreneurial act is so unnatural, and you really need some impetus and reason to do it. And obviously, you’re discussing how that’s the case for you, even for a project like this.

But also with the series, my hope is that it causes a sort of creative contagion, where when you see someone Doing beautiful, inspirational work, you are more inclined to do it yourself.

And I think we are sometimes reluctant to admit how big of a factor that is. And you can see this in practice because there are these huge creative clusters like San Francisco and Berlin, where if you are there, or increasingly the equivalent virtual ones, you’re just much more likely to be doing that sort of creative work. So I’m hoping we can get some of that contagion going with the series.

00:23:17 - Speaker 1: What really was a discovery for me, producing or researching the protagonist, we were sometimes going in the direction, OK, let’s search for the most renowned or most famous artist or programmer or whatever person we know, which could be an interesting protagonist.

But on the way, we also thought, OK, let’s search for the more regular guy or regular women and We talked to so many different people and everyone seemed like kind of a small superhero when we got to know them.

Even if they are not well known, they are at the beginning of their professional career, they are a freelancer, just earning their money by doing their job, but also they have such unique And interesting styles and way of working and how to re-energize themselves in their private life and how to balance themselves.

These are also important questions for my own life because work-life balance always problematic in the film industry, but Besides that, I was just so compelled by what these people said, so that I thought, this is kind of the gold piece.

If we can, in the series, get something to really get to know the guy or the women around the corner and search for their unique magic in their work. What’s so unique about their work and how they do it. And each episode shows a little different side, a little different angle of someone’s work. And that adds something to your own view on your own work and on your collaboration with your colleagues. And that would be something I would really love to achieve with a series like that.

00:25:12 - Speaker 3: This is one of the reasons why I love the maker biography genre, which is a term that at least Adam and I have given to these studies of individual creative lives, because when you look at an individual life, and you look not just at their eventual accomplishments and triumphs, but the whole process, it’s this incredible fractal, detailed, ultimately beautiful thing where there’s all these, you know, struggles and you know syncrasies and weird ups and downs and weird habits and stuff and That’s something you can only get if you look at an individual life. If you zoom out to all people who, you know, paint stuff, what are you gonna say, oh, you know, they study colors and they put stuff on a canvas and some of it’s good, you know, but if you look at the individual, you learn about their studio and their upbringing and how they got inspired and their individual subjects, it’s so rich. So I’m a big fan of this genre.

00:25:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Mark, I think you coined the term, or at least as far as I know, the Maker biography, but maybe it was when we were speaking about that I kind of had discovered this what felt like a genre of book, but I guess it’s just biographies about people who start companies or do science or make art, and it’s really not just about seeing that final piece that final result of their work, which you may already know if they are someone famous, but actually the process how they get there.

So for example, I read a biography of Charles Darwin. Recently that kind of talked about his, you know, life journey. I’ve read a lot of famous scientists biographies, but there’s also entrepreneurs and product creators, so there’s something like there’s an autobiography by the Pixar founder and CEO, super interesting story there, or there’s a biography of Ruth Handler, who started Mattel, and basically invented the Barbie, has a really interesting entrepreneurial life and journey.

So there’s a number of these, but to me it’s the behind the scenes. It’s the struggles they went through, the false starts, the uncertainty that they experienced along the way.

It’s that journey, and that is so inspiring to me because I’ve been through that journey, obviously not on the scale of success of those folks I just mentioned, but they’re similar, right? And that’s part of what we’re hoping to get in this series is. You watch each of these individual ones and even if these folks do very different work from whatever your particular discipline is, you see something similar in their journey or as much of it as we can show in the 4 minutes or so we have budget to film.

00:27:33 - Speaker 1: What I would be curious because we kind of also want to find the similarities or differences between filmmaking and the tech industry and your software programming.

I think a lot of your work is also to reflect the product and ask the people how do they find it, how you can make it better and You really always updated your product and with the film, it’s always or mostly a finished product and then you get the feedback.

Sometimes you have the money and the effort to get a test screening and of course you have feedback loops before, but if we would proceed this series, I would very much be interested in what the viewers say about it and what would be protagonists or Jobs or what kind of fields of work people would like to dive into or what kind of facet they really love and what not to really like put these way of work from your field a little bit more into the filmmaking world and because that was really interesting in the The way you worked with me, it was so different with how I worked with clients or with, like, sometimes the client is more the director or other producer and you are the production team. And I really love to experience a different style of collaboration, always so easily technical, organized and very much on point and very structured. It’s something I really sometimes miss in my everyday work and talks and discussions, which sometimes get out of hand and never ends, you know.

00:29:20 - Speaker 3: It’s interesting that you have this inspiration from how software is built and technology firms operated. I think Adam and I have drawn a lot of inspiration from how film is produced.

So typically with software, you would have a big standing firm that has a bunch of full-time staff who are hired for 2 to 4 years or whatever, and those people would build a series of products, and that’s one way you can do things, but I’ve always been fascinated by what Adam is termed the Hollywood model, which is you have these loose networks of people who each other to varying degrees because they’ve worked on projects together in the past. And then when you have a new project to work on, you bring together a team just in time around that particular product, and you work on it for some weeks or months, and then the team disbands, and you have some stronger or weaker connections based on that, but you will reform with different people for subsequent projects.

And I’ve always thought that that’s a very interesting model to play with in the software world, and Adam in fact did some of that with the lab, but you can think of it more generally as a sort of continuum where on the one hand you have the fully salaried standing firm where people are there forever, and the other hand you have like whatever these gig sites are, where you hire people to do one hour of work, and playing with that continuum, you get different trade-offs, and I think it’d be worth people on software learning more from how the film industry operates more dynamically in terms of staffing. And also, by the way, in terms of hiring, the way you hire in film, as I understand it, is it’s based on your portfolio and then an audition or equivalent, right? Whereas the way typically you’re hired in tech is based on your resume. Can you imagine hiring someone for your film project based on like, I don’t know, where they went to school or something, it doesn’t make any sense. You would look at their portfolio and then you have them do an audition. And again, I think that’s something that we can and should learn from in software.

00:31:09 - Speaker 2: I’ll just add on to that that, you know, we mentioned the networks earlier and you see this often if you look at the film credits or even more dramatically famous directors like ah Christopher Nolan or something, you know, they often have many of the same actors will show up in subsequent films, even though those films don’t have anything to do with each other in the sense that they’re not sequels or part of the same.

Cinematic universe, but that director likes to work with this actor, and you see that also if you go and look at the credits, you see they’ll often have the same camera people and producers and costume and lighting people because again they have that network, those people they’ve worked with in the past that they know they have a good relationship with, or they think this person would be great, you know, I know this camera person is really good at the kind of wide angle shots that I need for this film, so I’m going to call them in on this. And so you get these loose networks, but it’s not the, I’m signing a contract to be full time and work nowhere else at this one firm for the next 4 years, 10 years longer. It’s a very different model.

00:32:11 - Speaker 3: And by the way, I think it’s not just different or interesting cause it’s unique. I think you could argue it’s empirically more successful.

So let’s go back to the world of software engineering management. You see people say, oh, you know, it’s a super creative project, it’s very risky, it involves all these different functions and by the way, a bunch of these people are total personalities, you can’t manage them. There’s no way you could bring together 5 or 10 people to build such a thing with any amount of certainty or predictability.

But then you look at movies and they have these $100 million dollar things involving thousands of people, hundreds of different disciplines all the time. There’s something that they figured out there about how to bring together these incredibly complex and creative endeavors with some amount of predictable success, not obviously not all movies work out, but they mostly all ship at least, and then a lot of them do work out, and that’s much more than we can say for even much more moderately scoped software projects. So again, I think there’s something to be learned there.

00:33:03 - Speaker 1: It’s really awesome to listen to you because it’s so much reflects on what I’ve been through the last month with my future project because there were a lot of individuals and amazing film will come out of it, but it’s always a struggle and it’s always a risk and you need someone or more people than one. To bundle them together because a lot of creative potential is also everyone goes in their direction. Everyone wants to get out everything they see and want, but you all have to put it in one pro, come back to product, but into one film.

And usually it’s the director who makes that creative choice and the producer who makes the choice financially, organizationally with that, but also on a creative level and For me, I’m kind of the manager of a lot of creative and disruptive people and I have to keep them together so that a film will come out which works and that’s such a complex.

Thing to do, but I think if you find out what are the people, the players I need to put together to really get a dynamic here with the product, also in your field that you say, OK, I need this programmer with this designer and Together with them and the right vision, we can build something.

I think it’s very similar with film production.

We all work at the end of what’s possible, and we want to go beyond, and you have to have a big understanding. Of the creative vision of everyone in your team to really know how I can handle those people and if you can, then you can really do an awesome film. Otherwise, it’s just a mediocre product and it will maybe work. And I would not say I’ve accomplished that fully, but I think that’s something if you really can do that, put the right people together with the right vision and know how to put them together and when to say something and when to go to script development, the very beginning of like a, a feature film, for example, or a pitch paper with a commercial project. It’s always the question, how much more rounds you need to go, how much further you can push it. And then you need to know the other person of how far I can push him or he can push me back with what he wants for his realization of something.

00:35:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I don’t want to pull too much into the industrial organization of film versus software, but one other point I’ll make here is that I do think another thing software can learn from this multidisciplinary person who’s responsible for pulling together and synthesizing and software you obviously have that with founders at new companies, that’s their job by default, but it’s often missing in larger firms where you have The product person and the engineering person, the design person, but there’s really no one who’s necessarily responsible for pulling it all together, and I think that ends up typically being a mistake. And one thing I like about the world of film is that there is that director and producer role, obviously in the biggest films, but even in the smallest 234 person operations, you still expect such a person to be that synthesizer, and I just think it’s really important.

00:36:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so that’s to compare to our little kind of miniature crew here, that’s the role you have Max. You’re the producer, your job is to make sure everything fits together, it works. There’s obviously nuts and bolts elements like can we do this on time and on budget and does everyone show up at the right time and all that sort of thing, the herding of cats, sometimes we call it in the software industry.

Whereas Marcus, the director, he’s more about the visual style and maybe some of the creative elements, the camera person is focused on maybe some of the particular shots and particular visuals, but I certainly would say, I mean, you talked before about describing yourself as a creative producer. It is a very creative role because I think making all those pieces fit together holistically.

The trains run on time, hurting the cat stuff is how you get there, but the end result, like you said, if it’s something magical that fits together really well, that conveys a strong story versus being a grab bag of everyone’s weird ideas that don’t. Fit together well, which is very easy to happen when you get together a bunch of creative, opinionated people that all have their own agenda, their own ideas, maybe very good ideas, but if those ideas don’t fit together in a way that makes sense or in a way that’s practical, you don’t get a good end result.

00:37:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we should not talk small the organizational part because I just experienced it with my last project where I was working a lot in the organizational side as a production manager. To be detailed and to really have everything there you need for the film set, sometimes 40 people wait because you don’t have a shovel and you are in the forest and you need the shovel to dig a hole and everyone is there, everyone is on time.

The creative vision is there and everyone functions, but the shovel is not there and you are in the remote location in the forest and Everyone gets crazy.

People drive from the set to the next store to buy it. People from the office drive to the next store to buy it at the end, they shot something without a shovel because they came up with a new idea.

You know what I mean? To be detailed, to be on point is. Also very important in film production. You can’t be lazy or forget something because if you forget to record something, to do it in post is not the easy sentence to say.

Some people joke about it and say, oh, let’s do it in post. We didn’t manage to do it here, but the people who have to do it in post, it’s crazy, much effort to do something in the post-production. You really missed by an easy thing on set, on shoot. So, I think it’s really also important for film industry to be very detailed and the groundwork needs to function.

00:39:10 - Speaker 2: Let me return to a point you were making earlier there, Max, about learning from kind of how the software world works and how we brought a little bit into the Create series, and this is actually a bit of a call to action for the listeners here.

So in the software world, we typically do betas. And certainly the way the muse does it, I try to do it on every product I work on, which is whenever you make a new thing, a new feature, a new capability that you treat it as an experiment with kind of the default is the null hypothesis. People won’t want or need this feature, and you should just remove it.

And the best way to do that. If it’s kind of a beta that is not part of the shipped product that people can opt into, they can try it and then you find out pretty quickly, is this something really useful that becomes a key part of someone’s workflow and then you can and should roll it into the finished product, or sometimes it turns out it falls a little flat and you decide to change it, or maybe even just cut it out in the beta, for example. So that’s a little bit what we’re trying to do with create.

So you can think of this pilot episode here as kind of a beta. And we wanna put it out to our audience here. I hope everyone listening will go watch it, as well as read the memo about some of the motivations, and tell us, is this something you’d like to see more episodes of. And I certainly hope the answer is yes, because not only because it was enjoyable to make, but also I think the power of the series actually would come from seeing multiple types of creators and seeing the similarities, seeing the patterns across them. That’s what we get through our user research, we’ve spoken to so many of these folks, and so seeing that even if there’s a brand designer and an architect and a writer, that they share a lot in terms of how they at least come up with their ideas. So I’m hoping that we will be able to continue, but we want to get folks feedback so you can think of this first pilot as kind of an early beta, and basically you should watch it and send us your feedback, as well as help us find new protagonists.

So, the way that we looked for subjects for the film was largely through our own networks a little bit, as well as trying to keep it local here, just so we could not need to send the film crew anywhere far away.

But now that we have this first episode out and you can kind of see what we’re trying to do here, we’d like to put the call out to our audience to say, who do you know that would be awesome to profile here? And they could be a muse user, we’d like some of them to be, they don’t necessarily have to be, and maybe we’ll do a mix, but whatever it is, they should do something inspiring and interesting.

Maybe there’s something interesting about their personal story, and as you said, you know, we spoke to a number of folks to be protagonists for this first pilot, and every one of them, as you said, in their own way, they’re the hero of their own story, and they were inspiring to speak to and see not only the work they create, but how they create it. So we’re looking forward to finding more folks like that and so the calls to action for the audience here is not just, should we continue this series, but who else should we feature. Well, before we wrap up, I always like to be a little future facing. So Max, if we do get the chance to work on more episodes of this series together, what did you learn, what did we learn together on the pilot that you think we would do a little differently for future episodes?

00:42:22 - Speaker 1: Thanks for asking and I really hope that we have the opportunity to do more episodes.

In the beginning, when you come up with the idea or you come with the idea to me, I calculate it, I try to schedule it, I try to schedule the time of everyone and how we produce it and now I would do it in a different way to have more time with the research, maybe to even have a person or someone who dedicates itself if we do 5 or 10 more episodes, so we can meet 20 to 40 people which are already pre-selected. And to do the interviews we did, I think this is very important to have the preparation time and to have enough time and space to plan and produce the script for it. I think.

Also, I would like to work more on a unique theme for like a musical sound design theme for this kind of series which you can recognize it too, but this also needs more time and, yeah, more energy to work on. And that would be two things I would say spontaneously that we would do differently. What about you?

00:43:41 - Speaker 2: For me, a big surprise was definitely how much the protagonist search, not just the initial kind of coming up with people we could speak to and having those initial conversations, but really the process of explaining to them what we wanted to do, trying to suss out what their story was, which of course is, you know, for a stranger, near stranger to them.

Then they’re exposing things about their personal life and how they work and so forth, so that we can then evaluate what sort of narrative arc would come out of that, and so there was sort of a trust building process that we were going to make something interesting and worthwhile to spend their time, and so, yeah, all of that ended up taking quite a lot of time.

We spoke to some really great people and got pretty far in the process with many of them, but yeah, surprising amount of the time and energy was spent on that, but in a way, you see how it pays off, right, with a documentary piece, you know, we’re well literally documenting the life and the work of someone, and so they’re finding the right subject, finding the right protagonist is huge, right? That’s the center of it. If you have someone great, that’s your Source material and from there you can build a good narrative and you can make it visually interesting and so on. And so really giving some good time to that.

But I feel like we learned better how to do it through this process. If we were doing more episodes, we could do them in parallel. I think we just learned a lot of the process of how you build that relationship, find the story, and then build up to that filming day, which is really asking quite a lot of the person who’s being featured.

00:45:17 - Speaker 1: What I just thought of while you were talking is that the core strength of it is that it’s authentic, that, that’s real people, even if we try to condense what we want to tell about their life, about their work, it’s real and they didn’t rehearse it with us.

So the time we spend with getting to know them is also a key element to the success of it later. So they trust us.

They trust us coming in their life, showing their children, showing their workspace, showing their raw, unfinished work.

I think to build that kind of trust with the protagonists is very important and I think with Katherine, our first protagonist, we got that far. She really opened up to us. She told about her past, she showed her kids, she really opened up and I think that’s important to keep for future episodes.

00:46:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, very well said, and of course a huge thanks to Katherine for going out a limb on us a little bit, especially now at least we have a pilot episode, we could show future protagonists and they know sort of what they’re getting into, but she showed a lot of trust and spent a lot of time with us for something quite unknown, and yeah, absolutely, building that relationship, it’s a partnership between the protagonist, you and your film crew, and the Muse team and me who, you know, have something we want to express through this medium.

00:46:43 - Speaker 1: And I think the best case would be that the protagonist as an, I don’t know, artist and a programmer, I don’t know what kind of work he does, but gets something out of this video production as well, that he thinks he is portrayed well and he’s respected well and that he’s eager to show it to his friends or even put it on his website as, hey, that’s how I work and That would be the best case scenario. I don’t think we will achieve it with all protagonists, but that’s something I would really like that they are proud to share it and feel respected with it and their work is respectfully shown.

00:47:25 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on Twitter at UAHQ or via email hello and Musapp.com. Help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Max, it was a real pleasure to work with you, get an inside view on how film was made, particularly for a person with prodigious talents such as yourself, and I very much hope we get the opportunity to continue the series and continue to document the lives of inspiring makers.

00:47:56 - Speaker 1: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Mark.