Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Camille Smura. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Camille, thanks for joining us 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.

Media production, as a whole, has both an intrinsic skillset involved as well as an extrinsic one. You can learn all of the software, budgeting + scheduling rules, rate and union stipulations, quote-unquote best practices, etc. And, though these are all necessary, knowing these alone will not just allow you to produce good content- that takes life experience. So my general opinion is the best way to get good at creative crafts, especially producing media, is to experience everything you can in life. Experiencing strong emotions, taking risks, meeting strangers, eating foreign foods- all of these situations help you hone the craft in ways that cant be taught in school or learned from an internship.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Camille Smura! I’m a director and producer based here in eastern Los Angeles. I run Wiseacre Creative, a full-service creative and production company that specializes in commercials, branded content, and music videos.

I always got in trouble as a kid for having a “smart mouth” so I’ve used that sort of ethos in much of what I do now as an adult. I don’t believe in rules, only that there must be better ways to make things; out of the search for that Wiseacre Creative was born.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I probably shouldn’t publish this information out here, but. I literally started my company while I was working in-house at a large, very well-known agency in the same field. I was motivated by a similar mindset of disagreeing with how things were run and knowing I could do better. It ended up being a pretty quick transition once a client I had just acquired at my side hustle also started working with us at the large agency. I realized I had to quit before the first Zoom meeting before they recognized me and I got in major legal trouble. Anyway- statute of limitations, am I right?!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I feel like this entire year (2023) has been a lesson in resilience. From recession scares, to inflation, to union strikes- most folks I know haven’t worked consistently for more than a month all year. I didn’t work from January through March- it was a super scary time and continues to be. I think harnessing that anxiety and fear and using it to propel my creativity to find new avenues for income and work has been the best thing to come out of all this. Finding new ways to make yourself useful and provide services, as a creative service agency, is the key. I pride myself on being super flexible and able to run very lean and efficient productions- the same principles have applied as I’ve had to shift our offerings to fit the every-changing industry mold.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.camillesmura.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/camille.smura
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camillesmura
• Other: www.wiseacrecreative.com