Hey, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Caitlin Rossi. I'm your host, and I'm the creative director at Storyblocks. If this is your first time joining us, we are a stock media subscription service that helps creators and brands make better video content faster than ever. Today, we are talking with three seasoned professionals about the most common bottlenecks in video production workflows. If you've worked with any size team, I'm sure this topic is going to resonate with you. They're gonna tap into their past experience to share how to spot bottlenecks and how to prevent them. Joining us today, we have first off Chris Levine. Chris is the head of production at Wistia, which is a video marketing platform that helps businesses create, host, and analyze videos. He's been making videos with them since two thousand eleven, focusing on creative ideas and approachable workflows. He leads their in house team testing new techniques and workflows from AI driven experiments to remote production, with the goal of making video creation easier and more human. Next, we have Maggie Linder, who is the director of studio operations at Freethink Media. Freethink is a media company producing stories about innovators, ideas, and movements shaping the future. In her role, she leads resourcing, budgeting, talent management, and more to produce their innovative video content. With a background in post production, Maggie excels at blending her operational skills with a passion for storytelling. And finally, have Michael Hood, who is the lead video editor at Freethink. Mike has spent the last eight years contributing to the company's growth and evolution. In that time, he's edited over one hundred short documentaries across editorial and branded content for clients like Intel, the NFL, and Ancestry dot com. Mike has been instrumental in creating workflows to bring together multiple editors in sync. So thank you all so much for joining us today. We're happy to have you here. Thanks for having us. Hello. All right, before we jump into questions, just a couple of notes for the audience. You'll notice to your right that there's a chat and a Q and A window. You can ask questions or engage with your fellow audience members right there at any time. We'll try to address some questions throughout the discussion, but we'll also have dedicated time at the end for Q and A. And then second, this event will be recorded and shared afterwards. So if you have to jump early or miss anything or want to pass this on to your peers, you'll have that link in your email following the event. And with that, let's get into it. So I think like first, before we start figuring out like how we address any sort of workflow flow challenges, it's important to understand what exactly we mean by that and what the common ones are. And the reason that you all know what some of these challenges are is because you've encountered them yourselves and had to figure out how to address them and pivot from them. So I'd love to start with you each sharing a real bottleneck that you've run up against in your video production career. And I think I'll kick it off with Chris, who's in the top window there. Alright. Well, lucky me. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah. I would say for us at Wistia, we are working with a lot of stakeholders. We're part of a bigger team. We're the creative team, which sits on the marketing team. And on the marketing team, we have product marketers. We have we interface with product managers, and a lot of our stuff that we're making are product videos and front page videos, stuff for our marketing for our assets. And bottleneck common bottleneck for us, It's pretty common in a lot of different industries, but specific for us is getting stakeholder feedback because there are a lot of stakeholders. And It's more important some some videos are more important to get that stakeholder feedback than others. But, yeah, just making sure you get the right eyes at the right time is pretty critical. And, yeah, I mean, like, with a lot of stuff that's happening with AI, it's easy to fix mistakes in post. But sometimes it's it's it's not possible. So with a lot of the stuff we do, specifically stuff that's high value, things that are on our product page or on our front page, It's all about getting stakeholder feedback and making sure that you're getting the right people to actually weigh in before you ship it and start entering into the production phase. Yeah. And the bottleneck there could be, you know, too many cooks in the kitchen creates problems. A hundred percent. Yeah. Just by we like to work and open out in the open in in Slack at Wistia, so there aren't many locked channels. Which invites a lot of critique. So and I'm not about to start going DMing people, but sometimes I'll phrase it in such a way that, you know, I'll at mention the right people. So that I'm trying to avoid Just if anyone has an opinion, they they bring it. And especially, I can kind of I've been there for long enough where I can kinda gauge you know, whose voice rings louder. But some of the more junior folks on the team, yeah, definitely could end up with the too many cooks, spoil the Still The soup. Whatever that is. Yeah. They spoil something. Yeah. And Maggie, how about you? What's say a bottleneck that you've run up against with your time with working with teams? Yeah. You know, I think Production tech being really locked down is a very important thing. And I recall years ago when I was working with Freethink as an assistant editor, there was one project where we had multiple cameras and timecode wasn't synced and production sound also wasn't synced. We didn't have jam synced time code. We didn't have LTC running properly. And there were even like varying frame rates and things like that. And so I remember spending days syncing that footage, maybe even weeks syncing that footage in order for us to be able to edit it. And then on the back end, when we were conforming for finishing artists, it was another headache getting back from proxies that had synced to the original media. So little things like syncing in production is really, really important. That's a small example, but it's all the small things. Mike, what about you? Chris, you took mine, but I'm happy to pivot and provide some extra examples. And maybe I'll get a chance to talk about that later because I think that's a huge bottleneck. It's like a lot of times we think about workflow, we think about tech specs, we think about hardware. A lot of this stuff is very human. So there's a lot of room for bottlenecks there. I think if I was going to pivot, I would say now that technology has changed over the past definitely over the past five years, especially given the innovation that we had to do with COVID. FreeThink's been like a remote kind of first company well before COVID. So one of the things that we've really had to evolve and continue to evolve is just sort of, like, making sure that the material is prepped in a way that we can use with the systems that we rely on to edit efficiently and effectively in real time. And so making sure that we are always sort of auditing sort of how we are treating and handling the materials, whether they start raw and we convert them into something else, making sure that that all works seamlessly with the streaming services that we use to do our jobs, especially in post. Yeah. That's incredibly important. Having, like, very organized systems and workflows can really make a big difference, especially when you're working, you know, with people across the country and all remotely as well. Great. Well, now that we know a few of the bottlenecks we've come across, and I'm sure we'll bring up some more later, But let's go ahead and jump into how we're able to diagnose those within our teams and start to spot what the problems are. So I think I'll start with Maggie. You know, we talked previously about, like, one of the most obvious signs that you have, like, a bottleneck within your workflow are obviously missed deadlines. But, ideally, you wanna be catching things before you get to that point. So, Maggie, are there any, like, early warning signs that you've noticed within your teams that might indicate you have a bottleneck somewhere in your workflow process? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, when we're working quickly, we have we just have to be more communicative. And over the years, as we work with partners who need things faster, we've had to right size our workflows to be able to deliver. And and so sometimes that means like less time for prepping the project, less time in development and preproduction and then faster editing. And so I think one thing that has been really helpful is just regularly checking in with each other. And so I'll check-in with, you know, editors who I know are juggling multiple projects or working on a tight deadline and making sure little things like, you know, technically are things working well, like our machines churning the way they should, you know, all sorts of things like that, that we need all of our tools to be functioning in order for us to perform with tight deadlines. And so I think that's really important is close check ins. And then I also think we have on our teams, we have project managers who are partner services managers, and they're helping keep everyone on track and aware of deadlines. And so they'll post weekly, if not more frequently with upcoming deadlines, and it gives us as a team an opportunity to check-in and be like, okay. Are we gonna hit that? Do we need to reset expectations? Or is that all still possible? So I think just communication is really key with that. So Mike, you actually had mentioned one of the methods that you sort of address this issue is using kind of daily standups to spot these things. And you specifically called out something that you use, which is problem of the day. Can you explain a little bit about that process? Yeah. Yeah. So every Monday I lead a meeting with our incredible editors and assistant editors, and We have a set agenda that we run through, and that agenda is part casual, try to just have fun and inspire each other with what we're watching. And then there's other parts where it's like, Hey, what problems are you running up against? You can either use that as sort of a space to vent about something's happening. Because a lot of times too, it's like, if you're running into a problem, you're obviously frustrated and it's like, I want people to have an open sort of space to be able to bring that forward because that also is pinpointing pain problems in workflow. So, yeah. So one of those categories in the agenda is called problem of the day. That's a great place for someone to throw out like, Hey, I ran into this issue whether it's a feedback loop or whether it's a piece of hardware or software issue that they're having issues with, or it's like the material wasn't prepped right, how can we solve it? Having that space carved out, definitely on a weekly basis, obviously is routine, is super important because then it's like in the room, we can solve it together or I can leave and go talk with Maggie or other folks to try to solve it for them. The other part actually in that agenda as well is we have a tip of the day section where people can bring different tips of like, Hey, I learned this, or I used this AI tool to create this piece of archival know, sort of like create new assets. That has been also a really cool thing as well because that also helps us sort of adapt sort of workflows just by opening lines of communication. Then so I think, like, all in all, like, having these sort of set meetings kind of brings a routine pulse check on where sort of things could be affecting your workflow. It's creating space for people that are experiencing the work differently than maybe someone else, like bring up a different problem that we could find a solution for. It's creating space immediately to, like, solve those, but then also It's creating, an opportunity to sort of proactively and routinely sort of evolve your workflows through these knowledge sharing, sort of sessions. Yeah. I love that. I love the tip of the day as a way to kind of, like, proactively address things that maybe haven't even become issues yet, but I sort of helped you get ahead with what some of your team members have already learned. And, Chris, a question for you. So you called out when we've spoken previously that there is one step of the production process where it's incredibly important to spend extra time and really make sure you're figuring out where your bottlenecks are, and that is preproduction. So can you talk a little bit about why that's so essential and what you're helping prevent by dedicating extra time there. Yeah. Definitely. So it's kind of similar to where I was going from the first my first response, which is, yeah, we're working with a lot of scripted stuff and getting things word perfect before you actually shoot and getting yeah. It's not just about what we think, the creative team or the video team sounds good. It's what our clients think across the company, making sure we're hitting the right value props, making sure we're using the right language. That being said, like, there are different value of videos and some you know, we have to kinda match some of that process with the project. So we're still doing a lot of quick turn videos where we're not getting so in the weeds in preproduction. A lot of it's like, alright, we got the creative brief. We're going to run with it. And because we're an internal video team, we're not necessarily beholden to a bunch of, Like, clients that are gonna have thoughts and wanna make the logo bigger. So we can run with a lot of those quick turn videos. But for the ones like I was talking about with the the higher value videos, those front page videos, those product videos, product page videos that are gonna again get tens, hundreds, thousands of plays. Spending the time in preproduction, not just shopping the script around, actually, like, making animatics and trying to extract what is in our head that maybe a product manager might not be able to see or or a product marketing manager might not necessarily be able to see. I found that it's wildly helpful to pull reference frames, pull stock footage, you know, record an animatic scratch track, or just use eleven labs to just do a, text to speech. Just copy the whole script, paste it in there for pacing and flow and stuff like that. Getting everyone on the same page and being able to actually give them a window into what you're seeing. It's actually never been easier than right now. Before, you would have to really scour the Internet and and find reference frames or or or hire a storyboard artist. Now with, you know, with The library of stuff that you guys have at Storyblocks combined with generative tools, there's no excuse to not make an animatic anymore for a high value video because then you're just gonna get that much more primed for success knowing that you're going into production with everyone truly signed off, not just on the words, but actually on the vision of the video. Yeah. I'm sure that makes and now we're getting a little bit into the solutions, which we'll pivot to in a second. But I'm sure that makes the the review process just that much more smooth when everyone is, like, kind of on the same page upfront. So you're not encountering those problems of like having to go back a couple steps and rerecord things or get sign off on, like, new copy before you move forward when you're really spending that time at the front end of the video project. That's right, one hundred percent. Alright. With that, let's go ahead and jump into our next topic, which I think is where we're gonna spend the most of our time today, and that's how to design effective video production workflows. So we just talked a little bit about right sizing, Maggie, you mentioned this as well, workflows. So can you tell me a little bit, Chris, maybe first, how you have approached different videos, like these quick term projects, and the steps that are involved in that from, say, something that's going to be a hero video for a campaign. Can you walk through a little bit, like, what are some of the steps that you will maybe skip or you have a bit more templated in those fast videos versus the projects where you wanna make sure you have a dedicated time and space for every little thing along the way. Yeah. A lot of it will come down to the timeline and the assets that are getting requested. So if it's a if it's a piece, for a larger campaign, we all know this in the production world. Like, if you're if you're doing a campaign piece, You need the fifteen second. You need the thirty second. You need the horizontal. You need the vertical. You need the square. You need different, hook tests. You need a b c d, like, first frame tests, all of this stuff. So for a big ad campaign, which we're doing some in we're doing all that stuff in house, but we are doing some of that stuff. Kind of making sure you have that asset list. So that you know to plan in production, oh, you know, I should be shooting this open gate or, hey. We should just flip the camera real quick or we need BTS stuff on this. So, yeah, for the for the ad campaign, big campaign stuff, nailing that asset list. Super, super helpful. But then back to what I was saying with, you know, the the animatic stuff, do the there's I really don't think there's much of an excuse to not spend a little bit of time in the animatic phase, especially if you are an editor, in which probably most of us are here. Like, you don't need to actually open up a camera to put together an animatic anymore. You don't even need to record audio anymore. So there's really no excuse. And I actually started scripting in animatics because everything looks good and sounds good on paper. And you as you do this more, you can kind of think, alright. Yeah. This is gonna be about or one page is about one minute, whatever. But Yeah. You start to learn a lot of things about potential pacing issues or where where you should be cutting lines or shifting stuff around. So no excuse to not do an animatic. In the quick turn stuff, I think the quick turn stuff is really honestly about building trust with your team. We have permission, like, at Wistia, because we've worked with a lot of our colleagues for a while, we have permission to run on an idea even if it's not fully vetted and fully shopped with every with everybody for specific videos that may be lower impact or, less of a of a risk to our brand. But for any freelancers out there or any agencies out there, you can do that too, but you're not gonna do that with your first project with your client. Like, you need to establish some trust before you can actually run towards the finish line on something without constantly getting sign off on every little piece along the way. Yeah. Absolutely. Maggie, you had sort of mentioned rightsizing as well. So how do you think about this, like making sure that you have the right workflow designed for the right type of product project? And, like, what are some of the things that you consider when you're putting this together for for your teams to use? Yeah. So I think it's always there's tension between the scope of the project and the amount of time we have. And so we, on occasion, do feature docs. We just finished one recently. And then most of our stuff is web based, but sometimes we're doing, you know, a fifteen or sixty second original short, and then sometimes we're doing a, you know, ten, twenty minute piece. And so the type of workflow we use will depend on what the project is. And we, you know Scale it up when we need to. We scale it down when we need to. A lot of our content on our big think platform is interview based, and so we're just shooting one interview with multiple angles. We don't necessarily need to create proxies for that. The editor can generally handle a lot of the finishing on their own. But then, you know, if we're working on a feature doc where there's a lot more steps involved to get to the final product, a lot of, you know. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of finishing work that goes into it. So I think, yeah, that's kind of how I would think about rightsizing workflows all dependent on how much time we have and the scope of the project. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. And I think, like, what the reason why we do all of this all of this work to make sure things run smoothly is, a, to make sure we're delivering projects kind of within the time frame that we have to set them up. Another is to really maintain the consistency and quality standards of our work. So, Mike, I would love to hear from you. How do you work to maintain that quality standard across the multiple workflow tracks that you're managing and the multiple editors without slowing things down too much. So what are the practices that you put in place to make sure that you have that quality at top notch and keep things moving. Yeah. Like, as Maggie said, we're we have workflows for everything from, you know, a YouTube short to a a feature length doc. And so, basically, when you're designing those workflows, one of the things that I think is super important to keep in mind and honestly to protect when you're thinking about doing workflows is sort of your, like, non negotiables. So the things that's, like, you really need to sort of, like, hold tight to to ensure quality and consistency. Because basically, when you're you know, as we all know, like, when we're trying to decide if we're gonna create something fast or if we have time to to spend on it, like, you're basically just making trade offs. And so those trade offs kind of come in the forms of, like, you know, choosing to decide, like, you know, are we going to limit the scope or the time that we have in preproduction? I saw someone in the chat throw out that, like, you know, you need to, you know, fix it in preproduction and production, versus just post. But, you I think that the things that we're looking at when we're trying to sort of like, well, what can we get what can we get by with? A lot of times it's like, well, can we do something where the the workflow is completely, at least once you get in post, it's completely raw. Editors are given just all they're all assets. There's no prep. There's no organization. We need to work fast. But we also know that there's going to be things before that in preproduction that, like, need to stay true and then also in finishing and and final exports need to stay true. Other things that we sort of like you know, can sometimes choose to sort of, like, trade off as, like, you know, we're gonna basically trying to control what's gonna happen in production. So, like, you know, we're gonna be limiting the amount of cameras. That's gonna affect the way that we edit because we're not gonna have as much coverage. But, again, ultimately, we're gonna be trying to stay true to some things once we get you know, further along in the process. And so some of those nonnegotiables for me, obviously, preproduction development planning is super important. That's honestly one of the biggest things that pays dividends throughout the entire process. So not sort of adjusting that too much to the degree that you can, if you have the time. Then also, like, in production, as Maggie said, like, small things. Like, small details are are are not worth skimping on, like, not jam syncing time code between audio and sound. Technology has come a long way since obviously when Maggie was stuck with days and days of production footage. I think that was like we were shooting in Moab and it was like everything was beautiful, so you just don't stop rolling. But it caused a huge problem for us. So, like, little details like that, again, like, We'll just echo into the future steps of your your workflow. And Then also to internally, like, know, as Chris has said, we're we're gonna talk a little bit about how, like, reviews and different stakeholders play a part in workflows, but also internally, like, really sort of, consistent and sort of, like, timely and not sort of sacrificing your own internal reviews before something goes external is also a really important step that we don't skimp on at Freethink and BigThink. And then also, yeah, final exports. Like, never skip copy checking as part of your workflow. Like, never skip, never skip that because, you'll regret it. And then also, like, building tools, to keep consistent export presets as well. So that way, like, you know, whether you're have your own YouTube channel, making sure that every video that someone plays in your playlist has the exact same loudness. Little details like that within your workflow of maintaining those standards, I think go a long way in maintaining quality and consistency, whether you're working fast or you have time to to ride it out. Yeah. Mike, one of those things that we do with at Wistia for maintaining, like, the audio consistency is we run everything. It's absolutely not purpose built for this, but we run everything through Lander, which is like a mastering, plugin online. So you basically just, like, export everything at, like, negative six DB roughly. You do it like a rough mix in Premiere, export it at negative six rough, upload it to Lander, and then it spits out like a mastered thing that, audio file that's, like, slightly compressed in across all of our editors and freelancers. We know now that everything is getting the same level of compression, getting it off to, like, broadcast levels roughly. But I I was I was literally, like, taking notes as you were talking about on that last one. That's that's solid stuff right there. I've never heard of that tool. We'll have to look into that. Yeah. We use just the loudness the loudness sort of, like, meter or loudness normalization preset in Premiere, but that's actually, like it's I have to look into to Lander, l a n d e r? L a n d r. A n d r. Okay. Yeah. Like I said, it's a mastering thing for music, basically, but it does work quite well for mastering videos and getting them all at the same Level. Look at this. We're learning stuff. We're good good stuff. That's a great segue into a question we got from the audience, which Katie asked, what tools do you use to design and track workflows? So, like, what are some of the other systems or products, features that you're using to kind of hit all of these these things in your workflow to make sure they're well organized, well documented. I'll let any of you answer at all. I can jump in here because my my days are spent looking at Gantt charts. Yeah. So one of the main tools we use at Freethink is ClickUp. And, we have all of our projects in ClickUp. We have different views we create, lots of custom fields that we use to be able to filter information. And we find that really effective and an effective tool, whether it's, managing our data storage and our drives or managing timelines for different partnerships or, yeah, having a release calendar that everyone can see and look at and that's always live. So lots of different uses there, but I know there's lots of tools people love like Asana and Monday and all sorts of other things. So, Yeah. Yeah. We are Asana users ourself, and I think the majority of my team gets annoyed with how much I direct people back to Asana and tell them to leave comments there and check that, track every little task. But it really does make a difference when you have so many people trying to track one project to keep it all centralized like that. Chris or Mike, any other tools that you all use that you find particularly helpful? Yeah. We're big Asana users at Wistia. Helpful to be across the org there. And we have different buckets for, like, things for the the actual video team board. We have, like, different levels of the production process, so we kinda move projects over to the right as things go further down the production process. But it is helpful to have, like, a a log of decisions to, like, look back on in in in Asana. And whenever those move move over to Slack, it kind of ticks me off a little bit, because then you're trying to Play catch up, especially if you're not super attached to the product project. But, yeah, Asana and just huge Google Docs head. Specifically for scripting and collaborating and and tracking changes and leaving notes and getting feedback and all that good stuff. Go ahead, Mike. Sorry. No. I was honestly just gonna say that sometimes I'm embarrassed at how bad I am at using ClickUp. And so whenever Maggie and I, we meet weekly to track. We do air traffic control for all of our editors, and she also does that for all the directors too just to make sure that, hey, what projects are coming in and what projects are kicking off and what's going into production. And we use that to help assign and strategize who's gonna go on what project. And so I really rely on Maggie to keep me organized with ClickUp. So I I barely know how to use it, so I don't have much to add to this. I love that analogy of the air traffic controller. It really is that type of job. Cool. I wanna pivot a little bit, but stay kind of within the designing workflows area. And that's to talk about, like, one of the bottlenecks that I think comes up with a lot of different teams, and that is, like, the dilemma of, like, good, fast, cheap, and how you can only really have two of those. I think, like, in today's world with, like, the way that we create content for social media and the introduction of a lot of these AI tools, that is changing a bit. So I'd love to just kind of get your perspective on, you know, how you sort of approach the good, fast, cheap dilemma, maybe explaining it a little bit and how it matters to your team, and then how you make decisions on what to focus on in that triangle when you can't have all three of those things. So Chris, I think, you wanna take this one? Yeah. This is, interesting. So, like, to set it up, you have to pick two. Either you do it good, you do it fast, or you do it cheap. You can't have all three. Yes. I think AI is changing this slightly in different parts of the production process. Specifically scripting. I think it's very easy to get A good script, fast and cheaply. If if you have another video or another script that you can use as a reference point. One One way that we're using GPT right now is I'll take a video that we've written before, whether it was a hybrid AI written in human or purely good old fashioned human written. And can even copy the transcript from Wistia or what wherever. I can try and copy the transcript of the video. Use that as my reference. If that is the rough guide, tone, pace, vibe of this new video that I wanna make, I'll copy that, paste it into GPT, and literally just, like, attach the creative brief with some of the product messaging. And I'll even tell it to, like, crawl an a website that, of the feature. Let's say we're making a video about a new feature at Wistia. Crawl Wistia dot com slash new feature for any more information. And you will get a script in seconds that is an excellent starting point that, honestly, I have shot right out of the box with. So that's one example where AI is just, like, flipping that whole good, fast, cheap model on its head. Not saying that that's the same for every piece of the production process as I'm sure Maggie and and Mike can weigh in on. But, yeah, Wait. We a a a while back, we did an experiment at Wistia where we it's called one ten one hundred, where we gave one production company a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, and a hundred thousand dollars to make the same video with three different budget points. And You know, shocker, there is a point of diminishing returns with a lot of this stuff. And I think, actually, the one thousand dollar video, which was shot just on an iPhone, would actually hold up better in a post COVID world because everyone has kind of been programmed to care less about video quality. And I think it's cooler and, like, more in the zeitgeist to be able to see people's working from home setups because of all the stuff that went through with the pandemic. But zooming out It's all about the creative approach is what we found with this experiment. And so I think that does apply to that good, fast, cheap model where if you have the right right creative approach and you embrace some of those constraints, whatever those constraints are, if you need to do it quickly, if you need to do it cheaply, or if you need to do it really, really well, those are those creative constraints, that's where the good stuff is. And it's fun that we're in this type of industry that you can really embrace those types of constraints. So, yeah, it was a little bit rambling, but, I'll shut up now. Maggie and Mike, at Freethink, like, how all how do you all approach this? You know, do you see kind of that dilemma with the good, fast, cheap, or, you how do you approach that? Do you wanna go first, Maggie? Or Sure. Yeah. I think, you know, I I have the pleasure of getting to work a little more closely with our sales team on the presale process, and our sales team is the team that, brings in all of the business for our creative studio. And there are lots of times where they'll say the partner has this budget. What can we do with this budget? And so we're constantly weighing that or they say the partner has this timeline or they need the deliverables by this date. It's like, oh gosh, that is Like a third of our normal timeline to get a product like this together. And so we just have to figure out how to make it work. And I think one thing that has been really fun lately is we have had some things that sales team has agreed that we can do that we've never done before, and we have to figure out how to do it. And so one of those has been this partnership with Axios. We've been their production partner on their new show, and they say, hey, we'll tell you within forty eight hours that we're filming with X, Y, Z person. You know what? Our most recent one that we just published was with Zelensky. And they say, okay, you need to be able to get a team together to film this, and then you need to deliver within like twenty four to forty eight hours of filming. And we're like, okay, normally we have like weeks and, you know, and we had to figure it out. And it's been an amazing success. It's been so fun to work on, totally different than what we normally do. And now we have an amazing partnership and an amazing example of work that we can do in ways that we've been able to work that have been really successful. So I think, you know, being forced into it a little bit is helpful. Being forced to try new things or being having constraints actually creates new opportunities for creativity. And so, yeah, so I think that's. It's It's a good good way to work. Yeah. I would say too, like, the stuff that we're doing now, especially where Freethink started. You know, when we started the company, everything that we were doing was we had sort of like one product that we were making. It was what we called our marquee documentary, and it was just branded with different different original series. And so and every video that we made had the same workflow. It was extremely robust, like no stone unturned. It was very, very, very tight, a lot of lot of details. And so this idea of working fast and or cheap was very difficult for us to pivot to, or at least I know for me personally, like creatively, I was like, how do I yes. You want me to create a one minute video, and you want me to do it faster and you want me to do it like like way faster than, you know, the scale of what I would do with anything else. It was really hard for me to change my mindset to be like, Well, how do I let go of certain things? You said, Chris, I'm going to make it fast and it's gonna be, you know, cheap, but I'm gonna have to let go of, like, that good. And I think, yes, like, there's tools that have come about since then that, like, are helping sort of, like, surprise us in ways that we can do things fast and good. And, you know, relatively cheap with AI software subscription or whatever. That's been a real challenge, I think, for us, and we're continually learning just how do we continue to do this in a way that, again, satisfies us creatively because we're in this work because we love to do it. And, how do we design the workflows or how do we find the tools or how do we find the different sort of methods or techniques to allow us to do that, and fulfill that sort of personal creative drive. But, yeah, I I would say, like, if I'm being honest, like, it's it's it was tough, to make that transition. But there has been, as Maggie said, there's been some really cool projects that have come about where it's like, when you do hard stuff, U. Learn way more than you ever would if you were staying in your sort of your comfortable lane. And so I think a lot of times it just takes jumping off the deep end with something and saying, I'm gonna be uncomfortable, but I can either adapt or sort of wander in it is kind of, like, where I find myself. Yeah. I I love that. I feel like we could talk about this for an hour, but I'm going to move us on to the next topic just since we've got about twenty minutes left, and that is talking about working with stakeholders. We know this is a big potential bottleneck for a lot of teams, So definitely wanna spend some time here. I think I'll kick off with Maggie. So Maggie, one of the bottlenecks that you mentioned in the guide is that too many cooks in the kitchen thing can be a problem. I'd love to hear tips from you on how you make sure that you are getting the right people into your project at the right time to review and give feedback and how you kind of set that up to be consistent from project to project. Yeah. That's a great question. So within FreeThinks or BigThinks Creative Studio, we we work with partners and brands, and they have a variety of stakeholders on their end that want to weigh in and give feedback. We have some partners that we go through like three rounds in post plus, you know, treatment reviews and everything in development and preproduction before getting to a locked video. And then we have some partners where we give them they get one review and they're they're lighter touch. But I think one thing that's really helpful is within our on our team, we have structures in place and specific roles that so all of our all of our partnerships are led by a supervising creative producer, and they oversee all the work going on, whether it's written content or video content or social content for a partnership. And so they're they're looking at consistency. They're they really understand well the stakeholders with their partner. And all the trade offs that are being made. And then we have directors, writers, and then our editors. And so, you know, in post production, for example, an editor will post something, the director will weigh in, and then they'll make revisions, and then the supervising creative producer will weigh in, and then it'll probably go out to the partner. And then we always request that the partner gives us consolidated feedback as much as possible. But when they don't, it's the role of the supervising creative producer and the director to kind of filter and funnel and make sense of what comes back to the editor. And so I think having people on the team so that the editor is not just getting, you know, two pages of notes that are contradictory and having having people who are able to weigh things and say, oh, no, this person who gave us this note is actually more important of a stakeholder on the project than this person who gave the contradictory note. But we even have things like feedback logs that we ask our partners to put their feedback into and structure it based on, like, big notes, medium notes and small notes. So there's there's lots of work that's gone into. Consolidating things for sure. Chris, any any tips on how you approach this with your team in kind of keeping that stakeholder pool to the right size or smaller. Yeah. In terms of preproduction scripting, I encourage and celebrate good feedback as opposed to something like this line isn't working, and you highlight a line. It's too long. I would celebrate or I try to leave feedback like, this line isn't working. It's too long. Something like this might feel better. Blah. And just offering that type of critique with a suggestion goes a long way to disarm the person on the other end of the feedback. And so I really celebrate folks on my team that do that, and I try to encourage it myself. That kind of mentality can trickle into all parts of the production too. Don't just be a negative Nancy. Don't say this is the music's not working here. Let's try something else. Like, no. Offer me something. Give me give me something to go off of. And When we're doing dealing with client work, sometimes we don't really have that luxury of of of asking for that of our clients. But Good. Kind of tailing off of what Maggie was talking about too with feedback logs. We're not that in the weeds, as as you all are. But we do we use Wistia or you can use Frame. Industry industry standard tools really to make sure you have you're leaving feedback on the asset as opposed to in a Google Doc or, you know, whatever, an email. God god forbid an email. That sounds awful to then look through the email, and then you get a tab over to the video and see what time code and are they leaving at the right time code on the right version. So I like using Wistia time coded comments or frame, so that the feedback is on the video, and then you can thread the response, and you have a little micro log of stuff there, of of feedback decisions there. But then sometimes I won't Share a video with a review link at all. I won't even let people comment on the video. If I'm just looking for a pulse check, I will send that in Slack. And the stuff that's in Frame or Wistia, that I keep as, like, the that's for my editor. That's for the person that is editing this video, whether it's me or somebody on my team. The stuff in Slack be a more of an open dialogue and an active conversation, and then I can then Yeah. You know, we can then parse that out into feedback on the actual video that can then be implemented by the actual editor. So it's not just as easy. It's there's some nuance to it, basically, is what I'm trying to say. Some videos, all the feedback should happen on frame. But if you have stakeholders that may not be Super attuned to how the feedback process works for editing a video. Maybe you can have them get their thoughts out in Slack, and then somebody can then distill it into frame for for action to be taken. Yeah. I love that. One of the ways that we approach it too is, like, each person who's involved in the review process, they are often there because, like, they have a unique perspective or, like, their role is bringing something different to the table from everyone else in that same group. We try to be pretty direct, and we ask specific people what we want them to focus on. We do that for different stages too. We'll say for a rough draft, we're focusing on getting gut reactions to this direction. Does this feel right? Is this communicating what we want it to say? Then towards the end, you start getting into, like, the more detailed things where it's like, k. Tell me about, like, the colors that we used in this or, like, how is the music hitting in this last section of the video? So we try to there's, like you have to manage the feedback that's coming in by requesting specifically what you want people to comment on a little bit get the best feedback in. Yeah. That's super smart to, like, prompt the response. Mike, one thing I wanted to ask you about this. You mentioned that there are sometimes red flags in partner feedback cycles that you've learned to watch out for. Tell me a little bit about that and what they are. Yeah. I mean, I think we've talked a little bit about Having too many cooks in the kitchen, you know, and I think that that's that's obviously a huge problem and I think we're all aware of that. But one thing that a lot of times we don't talk enough about is the new cooks in the kitchen when there's already a lot of cooks in the kitchen. So stakeholders on the partner side or anywhere outside of internal that get added at different milestones has been something that we've experienced recently. I think that it's sometimes it can be great. Like, sometimes they can bring someone in at proposed picture lock, and they can bring an incredible insight into the video that, like, had you not had them there, like like, you may have missed the mark on, you know, being totally clear in your story or explaining a piece of technology correctly. I definitely it's nice sometimes when that happens, but I think a lot of the times it's like when someone new comes in and you have no idea who they are, they've never been in your external Slack channel or they've never been on an email. That's kind of a red flag because it's like, well, Had we known that this person was coming we would have maybe been able to ask questions of, okay, you're going to have so and so come in at this stage. Well, could we have them actually come in at RC two when the animations aren't fully rendered yet? Therefore, we don't have to potentially redesign or rerender or change the structure of the story. And so I think that that's one of the biggest red flags is when you start to see new people come in and you're not even given any sort of heads up. Because I think that, you know, a lot of times it's probably just best to get alignment with your partner to be like, hey. Here's how we're gonna operate. You're gonna get a rough cut one, rough cut two proposed picture lock at these dates. Who all will be the stakeholders? Is it everyone here in this meeting, this kickoff call? Will there be any new people coming on board? If so, what is their role and what should we be doing to cater to their POV. That way you don't kinda get caught with, sort of, like, scary notes in the eleventh hour. But I think that's one of the biggest red flags is when you don't have alignment on who's going to be giving feedback and honestly, who who has, like, who has the biggest say in the video in that group. Because if that person is the one that's surprising you at proposed picture lock, like, that's that's unfortunate you didn't know that ahead of time. So getting an alignment on that, I think, is super important. Yeah. That is such an important point, and we've definitely been in that situation where it's like the person who is ultimately signing off on the video comes in at the last stage. Like, ugh, we should have had them in at the very beginning, you know, because that's really where you need them to have eyes on it so you can make those decisions before you get to, like, one day out from publish. Yeah. Cool. Well, I think we've gotten through all of the scheduled questions, and I wanna get into q and a because we have a lot. But before we jump over there, I wanna do a really fast game with all of you. And it's a would you rather video production edition. So just rapid fire, I'm gonna ask, you know, would you rather x or why, And I'll go around and just have each of you answer that. Alright. So first one, would you rather have more time or more budget? Chris, start with you. More time, always. Mike. More time. Maggie, More time. Alright. Consensus there. You don't need the money. You just need the time to make it good. Alright. Number two, reshoot or fix it in post. Maggie. Oh, reshoot if there's budget. Mike. I would say reshoot. Yeah. It's coming from the editor, so that has curious weight. Chris I I have to. I took an oath. It's an imposed, baby. Alright. Contrarian. Alright. Last one here. Okay. Templates for everything or custom everything? I'll go first, and I'll say, I mean, I love I love a good template. But, yeah, that's a good starting spot. Maggie. I agree. Templates, yeah, as a starting point for sure. Chris? I'm honestly not trying to be contrarian, but I custom everything. I'm not type a. I like to do whatever I want whenever I want however I want. I know that's at odds with a lot of stuff we just talked about. We make the world go around, all of them. Right? Neither one is wrong, just different approaches. All right, thank you. Let's go into Q and A now since we have a bunch of questions I wanna make sure we answer from our audience. Before we do that, just a quick PSA. So we actually just released a guide that covers the most common bottlenecks in video production and how to fix them. If you go to the resource center, storyblocks dot com slash resources, you can find that guide, which has insights from all three of our guests today plus more. Second, our webinar program is taking a little bit of a break for the next two months. This is gonna be our last one of the year, and we'll be back in January with new topics. So stay tuned for details about that. Finally, if you wanna check out the amazing work from our guests today, follow and visit websites for Wistia, Freethink and Big Think as well, which is their sister brand, to see what our guests are up to and the type of work that they're creating. And with that, let's go ahead and get into Q and A. So I'm just gonna pull up my questions first, and I'm gonna go through in the order that they came in just to make sure we get to everything. All right, so the first question in here regarding production processes, what are some of the skills involved in using AI tools effectively? I can start. I think using them. Using the latest models, pushing them to see how far you can take them, pushing them to see where they break, where they actually start. Being doing more harm than good, I think, is the most important part of using AI right now because it's a the model. These models are gonna keep shipping. They're gonna keep changing. They're gonna keep iterating. It's a it's a really broad statement, but you have to be messing around there. I think if you're in any part of the production process right now to stay competitive. And I'm not, like, an AI doomer by per se, but I definitely, it's amazing how much I'm learning just by by being in the latest models, whether it's the synthesis voice synthesis models in eleven labs, whether it's the newest GPT five model comparing that to Grok versus Claude for scripting, or, you know, obviously, the the image generation stuff, mid journey, runway, VO. Specifically around, yeah, what's closest to crossing the uncanny valley? When do you have permission to use these tools, The ethics behind some of that stuff? All that is gonna come out by deep experiment deep and heavy and often experimentation in my opinion. Yeah. And Mike and Maggie, I know so you're with a media organization, so you might have some kind of different guidelines around AI usage in your process. Can you tell me a little bit about what that looks like at Freethink? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the times what we're using it for, I mean, we're not breaking news and creating assets to help tell that story. I think a lot of times what we're using these tools for is to help paint a picture, for something that's somewhat complex or abstract. But I would say too, in terms of safeguarding that, a lot of times with eleven Labs, it's an incredible tool. We love it. We use it all the time. I just used it. I I prompted my first voice last the past two weeks, create a custom voice for video. The A lot of these tools, you really need to understand what you're training them and what sort of assets you're feeding it. We've worked with celebrities, so we're very clear with people in our team to say, Do not feed these models anything from our productions or anything that would basically compromise any copyright or legal issue with their voice. You know? And so we do you know, with anything, if we're gonna clone someone's voice, we have a release for that that we get permission to make sure that, like, we're able to to do that, ethically. But, yeah, I think honestly just understanding what you're doing with them is important and what happens with what you input into them after it gives you the answer, I think is an important thing to keep in mind. Yeah. So we mentioned a lot of tools. I think we've covered them, but that was one of the questions. Which specific generative AI tools are you using in your production process? So, yeah, are there any others other than eleven labs, which has been mentioned? Chris, I know you mentioned a bunch of kind of generative models. I just used recently Luma AI for a project, and I did that in tandem. So I was actually using so I was using, like, ChatGPT to help prompt certain things based on its knowledge of the latest. It's called Ray three, which is its newest addition to its imaging capabilities. So using that to help prompt, feeding that to Luma, Luma generating the the video, and then taking that video and then using Topaz to scale it. Because I just did this, like, crazy It's like basically almost six thousand by fifteen hundred resolution screen, and I needed to take all these original generations and get them massive. So basically using those three tools. So Luma mainly and then Topaz to up res those was actually an incredible workflow for that project. Awesome, thank you. Again, I think this is another one we could talk about for hours, but we're running short on time. So I'm gonna jump to the next question. I'm gonna pass this one to Maggie. What safeguards do you have in place in case someone needs to hop off of a project and pass it to another team member? Yeah, that happens all the time. And, we use, Suite, which is our cloud, server to, store all of the media for projects. And so, you know, one thing we do is we always make sure that all the active project files and live assets are up there so that if an editor is taking some vacation time, much deserved, you know, that someone else can jump in if we get something that we need to turn really quick. And we have, you know, consistent file structures that we use that make it easy for someone to jump in and not, you know, have to figure out where everything is or what the latest timeline is, for example. So all those things are helpful. We even have you know, whenever an editor is handing off something to an assistant editor to go through finishing, we have, like, a checklist that they go through to make sure that, you know, everything is really easily understandable and there's not like a ton of disabled video on, you know, v fourteen that, you know, might, Yeah. Just little things like that That can make things challenging. Thank you. Chris, I'm gonna direct this one to you. So what advice do you have for teams that are working at capacity and and the work is still coming in? At what point do you decide when to hire another editor or bring in freelancers? And how do you foresee this workflow bottleneck before it's too late? It's a great question. Might not like the answer, but it comes down to budget. It's like the, you know, fast, good, cheap. Thing. You know, when you're at capacity, it it stinks to be you know, you have a bunch of people banging down your door. So, you know, we don't really have a rubric at Wistia, but my instinct is just because of the industry we're in, which is we're a software company, a video software, and the age of AI, We don't have time. We gotta we gotta ship. And our brand has certain standards, so we have to meet those standards. That being said, we're not we don't have, like, all this funding. Like, we're not losing money. We're a profitable company. We have to be doing things smartly. We have a budget. But my instinct is to always throw animate, freelancers at a problem if we're at if we're at capacity. And, you know, having some type of a workflow like Asana tracking so you see what projects are in flight, where the bottlenecks are, if there's a bottleneck because you need you're waiting on animation and the animators booked up. And so, like, you like, you'll know that with a decent Asana workflow. And for us, it's like, I literally have an email in my account in my inbox right now to inter interface with a new potential Freelancer. Like, building that network so you have people at the ready that you can spin up and hopefully, you know, pray that they're they're available, is is invaluable in my opinion. So we have a network of folks that we turn to quite a bit. That network could always be bigger. So if you're a freelance editor, we're looking for you. But, yeah, my if you have the budget, hire freelancers, in my opinion. Yep. And I'll just add to that. I think at Freethink, we want everyone to be busy even in our slowest seasons, and there's definitely an ebb and flow. And right now we have probably over fifteen freelancers working on a variety of different projects along with our internal team. And maybe even more than that, there's there's a lot of of work going on. And so I think you always wanna be able to to grow and shrink as needed based on based on the work in order to. You know, be a profitable company. So Yeah. That's awesome. Great. Well, again, I think we could talk for a lot longer, but we are at time. So wanted to thank you all for joining us today. Really appreciate your insights. And thank you to the audience for being here for the full hour and asking questions. So yeah, again, thanks for joining us. And don't forget to check out storyblocks dot com slash resources to see the full guide and for any other webinars, blogs, content that you might find helpful in your video production processes. So thanks everyone. Take care. Thank you. Thanks.
