We recently connected with Suzy Beck and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Suzy, thanks for joining us today. Can you share an important lesson you learned in a prior job that’s helped you in your career afterwards?
I’m have worked in the entertainment industry since 2006 when I graduated from Syracuse University. One of the first pieces of advice I received was to be kind and respectful to everyone around you because A) its the right thing to do and B) you never know when you will run into that person again. This is a small industry and things change rapidly. Someone who is a Production Assistant working under you one day may be someone who could hire you and be your boss the next. We are all adults working together in this industry and we should treat each other with respect and kindness no matter where we fall in the hierarchy of production. This business should be fun and joyful and treating every member of the team with respect and humanity in my opinion should be the absolute bare minimum we do. I have been on jobs where this concept is successful and I have been on jobs where the opposite has been true. When my partner and I started our business, Wild Free Studios, back in 2016 we knew that it was up to us to set the tone and to create an environment where everyone felt respected and cared for as a human and to hold that to a higher regard than “getting the shot.” We have found over the years that something as simple as that not only means that our crews are excited to jump on a project with us whenever we call but also that the people, places and brands we are filming with have a better experience with the production and in the end it creates a better more authentic and meaningful final product as well!
Suzy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I graduated from Syracuse Universities Television, Radio and Film program the summer of 2006 and packed my few belongings into my old 2 door hatch back Ford Aspire and began the journey to Los Angles to try to break into the television industry. These were the days when you still used a Thomas Guide to navigate the city and a physical book called The Hollywood Creative Directory to find phone numbers and fax numbers of production companies in town. I would spend about 10 hours a day calling production companies and asking if I could fax my resume over in case they were hiring for an entry level production assistant job and then I would follow up with another phone call to confirm they received my fax before moving on to the next. I had about $1000 to my name and was sleeping on my brother’s couch until I could find a job and hopefully afford to get an apartment with a couple of other recent Syracuse grads. I eventually got a call back for an interview and was hired as the newest Production Assistant for the hit Fox show Family Guy! I could not have been more excited about the opportunity for which I was paid $450 a week to make coffee, keep the copy machines filled with paper, take lunch orders and pick up lunch and generally keep the office running smoothly so the writers and artists could focus on their work. I took my job very seriously and was very detail oriented! However, I eventually realized that in order to be able to start paying back my student loans and make ends meet, I would need to find a way to make more money. I moved on from Family Guy to become an assistant to the Show Runner and Director or MADtv which paid slightly more and learned the ropes of a “live action” scripted show – until the writers strike of 2008 haulted production and I got laid off. From here I ventured into the unscripted television world because that is all that was able to shoot at the time and realized that my true love for production and storytelling was being “in the World with real people” in the unscripted storytelling space! I dove into tuis world head first and moved up the ranks from Production Assistant to Assistant to Associate Producer and eventually to Field Producer on history channel shows, travel channel shows, shows for Discovery’s Planet Green and eventually competition reality shows like MasterChef and MasterChef Junior and The Amazing Race! I absolutely adored this style of programming but my world was changed in 2016 when I saw my first episode of Chef’s Table on Netflix. It was documentary but filmed in the most beautifully cinematic and elegant way, telling the story of a chef who broke the mold to do something different that stood out from their peers… I knew at this moment that cinematic documentary was where I wanted to spend my career… I started putting some feelers out to see how I could transition into this type of storytelling and I was sitting in a restaurant in Switzerland on my last season of The Amazing Race when I received a text message from a dear friend who I had worked with previously that she had been hired as a Field Producer on a new show by the creators of Chefs Table called Street Food and that she had recommended they call me to be the Field Producer for the other team working adjacent to her. This friend had been working in an entry level position when I met her and she was now helping me get my dream job at the time. I couldn’t have been more humbled or more thrilled. I spent the next several years traveling the globe nearly non-stop field producing and sometimes directing international cinematic documentary series like Street Food (Netflix), Home Game (Netflix), and Men in Kilts (Starz). Meanwhile, while all this was happening, I met a man who would eventually become my husband who I connected with through our shared love of documentary storytelling. Together, we started our company Wild Free Studios that combines my background of producing and directing cinematic documentary for streaming platforms and his background of storytelling for people, places, brands, craftsmen, businesses and non-profits to bring the storytelling we do to the next level. In between my tv/streamer work, we have created video story telling for Shinola Detroit, Coca-Cola, Google Adwords and YouTube, General Motors and many Nonprofit organizations like No Kid Hungry / Share Our Strength, Alma Backyard Farms in Compton, ChildVoice in Uganda and Jonathan’s House CAR in the Central African Republic to name a few. We are able to hire crew who have the talent and skillset to work on international cinematic documentary series for our shoots for brands and non-profits because or our relationships with them and it proves to really elevate the work we are able to do. We believe that brands and non-profits deserve to have the same quality of assets and experience as any larger budget show for a streamer would have. And we believe the crews that we hire deserve to be treated with kindness and respect and decency whether they are working on a show for a streamer or on a non-profit shoot with us in the states or internationally. We are the leaders in our industry now and its up to us to set the tone and when we do, the people are happier and the final product is better.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is helping people who have never been on camera before to tell their story in a way that feels authentic and true to them. I dont think of myself as a “director” but rather as a “receiver.” I believe its my job to receive someone’s story and protect it so they can trust the way it is reflected back in the World will feel authentic to them. My favorite compliments that I receive that I hold the most dear are the ones that come from the person or people being reflected saying wow, you really captured the essence of this story, person, place. To me that is the most rewarding.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My main goal at the moment is to learn as much as I can about the World while working with people who treat others with kindness, dignity and respect.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wildfreestudios.com
- Instagram: @wildfreestudios
