Producing
Producing is the part of the job nobody sees on the reel: the crew, the schedule, the budget and the decisions that make a shoot day work. When it goes right, the day feels easy. That takes planning, and it starts at the first conversation.
A solid foundation, then the shoot
A producer's job is to have the shoot day decided before it starts. The crew arrives, the location is ready, the schedule holds, and the only surprises are the good kind, the ones that happen on camera. It takes many decisions to get there, and on MGMT most of them came early: a technical subject, a possible IPO, a brief that ruled out everything a corporate video usually does, and a piece that had to play inside an investor pitch rather than open one.
The team was lean above the line and below it. David Schwartz and I split the directing, he took the interviews and I took the set, and the days ran the way a plan runs when the thoughtful decisions were made in pre‑production.
Founder videos like DC Image Service and Digital Candy are the same job at a smaller scale: a two person crew, one location, and a founder who only has to say the true thing once, because the day was built so the camera would be rolling when they did.