We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bernard Ansa a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Bernard, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

There won’t ever be a day that you aren’t learning the craft, partially because there are so many facets of filmmaking to learn. From the art to the business, one has to not only learn how to adapt to the eye of the zeitgeist and appreciate one’s own style but also how to market oneself and make relationships. As a young kid, learning how to set up a shot a frame a subject occupied my mind. Now as an adult, trying to meet as many new faces as possible and leave a lasting impression is one of many priorities on set. For the creative minded, filmmaking will never stop being a wellspring of knowledge.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Midnight Coffee is a production company focused on the creation and management of new intellectual properties including short and feature films, tv series, and advertisement. As college students, each member of Midnight Coffee dreamed of creating and marketing content for the entertainment industry, and as College graduates we’ve put our wits together create a well-oiled machine professional in all aspects of creation, pre production, production, and post production. Midnight Coffee is welcome to all genres and media. Be on the lookout for our company as though we are young we will not always be small.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Creating manful stories is the name of the game. Everyone has a voice; a particular message that they need to get across. Uplifting people by allowing others to spread awareness to their message or cause will always be the most rewarding aspect of being an artist. As an artist I have a message that I want to spread about equality and the similarities we have by sharing in the human experience. And I want to allow others the same opportunity that I would want to create meaningful stories centered around one’s moral character.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

For a lot of filmmakers, myself included, learning to mitigate the inclination towards perfection is important in order to become a greater artist. Maturing under an immigrant household, the importance of perfection has been instilled into me many times over. From having to maneuver myself under the panoptic gaze underlining the black experience too striving for excellence as a first generation American. Perfection and the act of perfecting myself has been a relentless but exciting bedfellow. And while it has its place in attainment the self and the arts, a balance has to be reached between creating something perfect and creating something admirable. Whenever I suffer from writers block, for example, I am forfeiting my ability to create － an admirable pursuit － for a dream or vision in my mind of something perfect and unobtainable. Remembering to calm myself and have fun with my medium of choice is the only way to alleviate my concerns and enjoy myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://midnightcoffeeproductions.com/about
• Instagram: bernardansa, midnightcoffeeproductions