Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Nate Doane. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Nate, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Any thoughts around creating more inclusive workplaces?
As a film and TV freelancer, I’ve learned firsthand that there’s a fair bit of “shop talk” that makes it very hard for newcomers to get a start in the industry. Most every tool that we use has some ridiculous name with multiple backstories that everyone argues about – “M.O.S. is German, it means ‘mit out sound’!” “I heard that C47s get their name from the military, who wanted to make the clothespins on their itemized inventories a little more top-secret”.
M.O.S. just means we’re recording without sound, and a C47 is – quite literally – a clothespin. But if it’s your first day on a film set there’s a good chance you could be asked to grab C47s, a full apple, a Gary Coleman, some ‘number ones and maybe a number two to combine some doubles and singles’, or to ‘grab a buttplug for the redhead’ in your first hour or two working. This is one of the many (in my opinion unnecessary) barriers you’ll need to overcome to be able to keep up with the hustle and bustle of a working film set.
While it is fun to work on a crew who knows all the little codewords and sounds like they’re talking their own little language to each other it’s equally disheartening to be the new Production Assistant that nobody asks for anything because they have to explain what it is to you and that takes 25 seconds longer than they’d like to spend on the task because everything on a film set needed to happen two minutes ago. I’ve been witness to and even been on the receiving end of passive-aggression and full-on anger when someone asks for something specific that the other had not yet heard of. The film industry has been operating like this for a hundred years now, and all of this vocabulary is deeply cemented in the way we work, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change the way we approach working with new crews.
On every show, I try to get a feel for who I’m working with. Is this a brand new crew? Are they all veterans who just want to get to work? Is there a mix of people that I need to keep track of so everyone gets a chance to help out the team and show their strengths? On most jobs, it’s the latter and I spend a bit of time at the top of the day getting to know everyone and what their experience level is. This is helpful because it leads to clear communication instead of me saying something that the crewmember doesn’t understand and at best losing us a little more time and at worst causing a safety issue for either that crewmember or others on the set.
Personally, I don’t think it’s enough in these situations to expect people to ask when they don’t know something. A film set, especially for newcomers, is a fast-paced and stressful place full of all kinds of egos and personalities. It is wildly intimidating to begin admitting to people you look up to as professionals that you have no idea what they’re talking about, and unfortunately that is the only way you can gain that knowledge. It’s very uncomfortable, so I take it upon myself as a leader to be the one who brings up skill level first and tries to bridge the communication gap from my end first. This approach has led to me finding some of the best team members I’ve ever worked with and has made it much quicker for new crew members to show their strengths and learn new skills. When people feel like they’re the weakest link, they try to get out of the way. When you pull them up to the team’s level, they try to find out how they can bring the team to a new level despite what they may view as a skill gap.
I just got back yesterday from a feature film shoot in San Diego and I had an older guy, maybe in his fifties or sixties, on my team named Brad. Brad worked mostly in construction but had a little bit of recent experience in videography so he had a somewhat limited knowledge of the tools we were using. The rest of the crew were with me from Arizona, and we not only had the film vernacular down but also our own ‘inside-jokey’ vocabulary that ranged from literal grunting noises to references to memes that reminded us of equipment we had used in funny ways. Brad was always trying to get as much knowledge as he could out of us, and he was learning the terms and helping out in anyways that he could. We had Brad mostly running the slate and helping with the camera team, a role that he was exceptionally helpful in, but because of the size of the production and tightness of our schedule he had to play double duty and help us move some lighting equipment – something he wasn’t familiar with. I made sure to do all the same work with Brad that I did with any new crewmember, evaluating his skill level and making sure that instead of saying “Grab the redhead!” I would say “Hey, we’ve got this green bag with these orange lights in them, can you grab one of those for me please?”. I could tell that this was making him feel more like a part of the team instead of a burden. Late in the shoot, Brad was moving a light a little too quickly and a lens inside of the light fell out and broke. Brad took this pretty hard and offered to pay for a replacement, but unfortunately it was a special part that was hard to find on short notice. I made sure he understood that it wasn’t his fault, we were all moving a little too quickly and production had a little too much pressure on us. The last thing I wanted was for him to feel like the weakest link and get out of our way – he had already been so helpful. Brad came back from that in a big way and for the rest of the shoot HE was teaching US new tricks. We use something called a Dolly – basically a wooden or metal platform with wheels that the camera goes on for smooth moving shots – and during a scene where we were rolling audio the sound operator noticed that the wheels were squeaky and very loud. Before we had even started scratching our heads Brad knelt down and put tape all over the wheels. One of the crewmembers began to say “Uh, Brad I don’t think that’s-” “Try it now,” Brad said. The wheels were silent. “Yeah, one time I was doing a survey at an expensive building and my shoes were squeaking on the floor. I noticed everyone was looking at me as I walked by so I put some tape on my shoes. No squeak.” He was immediately on to the next task. Great guy.
In any industry there’s going to be inexperienced workers, and if you’re a business owner or leader I encourage you to stay positive with your team and find ways to uplift them and allow them chances to shine, rather than asking indirectly that they just get out of your way and find experience before they get to you. To be the new person with an established team can be intimidating to people and it’s not our job as leaders to gatekeep, but to pull up others to our level.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I’m a film and TV freelancer working as a gaffer and director of photography. I mostly provide services related to lighting and designing the look of commercials, narrative short and feature films, documentaries, and corporate videos. My first job as a videographer was when I was in high school in 2014 and I’ve been doing my best to create better images and closer connections with people since then.
I’ve always believed in finding the best people and creating the best teams. I take pride mostly in the people I’ve been able to surround myself with and work with and love being able to work with some of the most interesting and caring people I’ve ever met. I’ve found that with a good team and great communication you can accomplish anything and my secret to creating great images that my clients love is just keeping my team happy and giving them the ability to showcase their talents instead of trying to use it for my own gain.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
When I first quit my job to work on freelancing full time I had a lot of free time on my hands. There was this new thing just emerging on the internet called “deepfakes”. I saw a video of Barack Obama giving some kind of short speech, except it wasn’t Barack Obama, it was apparently a CGI rendering of Barack Obama that you could make say anything you wanted. I was fascinated by the technology and wanted to see what else it was being used for. Blackmailing businessmen? Causing nuclear war? Witty satire of authoritarian regimes? Well, obviously, no. It was pretty much all pornography.
But hey, it was still cool tech so I downloaded something called DeepFaceLab and played around putting Elon Musk’s face on other people’s late night talk show interviews. I felt like I got the hang of it in a month or so and forgot about it. Until I got an alert on one of my freelancer website profiles telling me someone was looking for a deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for stealing Facebook user’s data. While I didn’t really understand the concept or even what that was meant to accomplish I did understand that rent was due and I was broke. Guess I’m a deepfaker now.
They got in touch with me and asked what I would need to make it happen. I charged a few hundred bucks because while it was a lot of specialized work, I was still new to it. I said that they needed to record someone who at least had the same body and face shape as Mark Zuckerberg doing a good Zuckerberg impression since I can’t deepfake the audio. They ended up sending me a very dark and grainy video of a somewhat large man with a very wide face and long hair. I still went ahead and threw Zuckerberg’s face on the body so I could show them why Zuckerberg’s face on totally-not-Zuckerberg’s body does not a Zuckerberg make. I vowed off of deepfakes.
Except, now that freelancer profile said I did deepfakes and it turns out nobody else’s freelancer profile said they did deepfakes so I was getting a LOT of requests for deepfakes. I confided this in a friend of mine who’s business was going quite well at the time. He mentioned that when he didn’t want to take a job he just started adding zeroes to his bid until it was so much money that either they would decline or he’d be making so much money that he would want to do the job. I thought this was a novel idea, so I applied it to all of my deepfake requests.
Everyone from a mormon man who wanted a deepfake of his wife’s face on a pornstar to frat bros who wanted to prank their brother with his face on some cell phone footage turned down my ludicrous pricing. Was this working? Should I maybe have just done reasonably priced deepfakes instead of going this long with no work? Just then, one of the proposals I added some zeroes to gets back to me. “Can you do the hair too?” Well, no. I can’t. So I add some more zeroes. “I can do the hair for this much”. He accepts.
Oh god what have I done?
The job was to add Donald Trump’s face and hair to every single scene that the character of Mr. Potter had in It’s a Wonderful Life. This was of course one of those witty satires that I had dreamed about as a young deepfaker, but now we were talking about a seriously large amount of footage just for the deepfake not to mention adding in Trump’s hair frame by frame throughout all of these scenes. There are 24 frames for every second that Potter is on screen. In case you don’t remember (I do!) Potter is pretty prominent in the film. This project must have taken me 5 months of work all day every day, but it successfully kept me paid during a time where I had no freelancing prospects at all. Shortly after that, the freelancing site (and most sites) banned deepfakes of any kind. Thank god they did, because the strategy of just upping your rate if you don’t want to do something works a little too well and I really needed to be careful of what I wished for. Even though I no longer do deepfakes (okay, I do for the right price) I still keep that strategy in my pocket.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being able to do creative work is by far the people I’ve been able to meet and the places I’ve been able to go. From my documentary work alone I’ve been able to go to New York, Chicago, Virginia, Alaska, California, New Mexico, Florida, and into so many places where I would never be allowed access otherwise. I’ve met some truly inspirational people both on documentary and narrative shoots. On my last feature I met a man who escaped Saddam Hussein to come to America and start a mechanics business, where he made enough money to buy a house and a few more mechanics shops and have a son who had a successful career in the marines. On my last documentary, a heroin addict and his brother who used together for years but one day decided to use their bond to help each other get clean. I met him when he was at the point in his journey that his entire family was completely supportive of him and helping him rebuild his teeth that had been taken during his drug use.
I don’t know how I could get through life as a human without having these lenses to look through. I would be really worried to see the person I would be without the perspective of these diverse, deep, and unique people I have the distinct opportunity to speak to in very emotionally open and honest ways. It’s very peculiar the conversations two people have when they know they’ll likely never see each other again. Both when the camera is on and the camera is off I find myself in these spaces with people where we are speaking like we’ve known each other forever and are comfortable enough to share our stories wholly and honestly. It’s very, very, very odd and I find it hard to communicate to others who have not experienced it. I could go on and on with loglines of these people I’ve met. I’m just so glad to be in a position where my life has so much connection with strangers and so many great stories to tell.
Contact Info:
- Website: natedoane.com
- Instagram: @DoanerOfPhotography
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6634359/