The Serious Business of Having Fun: Working On Set

May 11, 2007 Minneapolis, MN


You are a Model, Doing a Small Job
Imagine you are walking out of your workplace for a modeling job you periodically do for fun, and for a little extra cash. Your employer isn't so uptight they won't let you out of the office, so these little unexpected work breaks about are something you look forward to. For art directors, business owners, and media production support staff, the experience is often similar: A little escape from the cube routine for (unexpected?) fun.

Photography studios, you have noticed, are nice. The typical established studio photographer has great furniture, posh amenities, coffee at the ready, usually snacks at the ready, plenty of magazines and lots of computer access. You're familiar with the sense of calm and control indicative of a photography shoot and you've come to expect it.

Now, imagine you enter a building with a number of photographers, a building you've been to once or twice before for other jobs, take the elevator to the 8th floor, step through the door to your job, and the first thing you see is a guy making his way across the receiving area doing some kind of dance to James Brown screeching "The (Big) Payback"? Other models waiting aren't sure what's going on either. The cockney photographer is trading barbs with his assistant, his art director or stylist before wrapping up the shot with a model, tossing his assistant in for a spoof product shot and emailing that off to corporate for approval - all while James Brown is wailing away in the background and the photoset "employees" are pretty much doing whatever the hell they want.

You might say, "I wish all jobs were like this!" You also might be inclined to wonder how in the hell anything gets done around here? Why this photographer ever gets hired? And how the hell the assistants - apparently spending most of their day cranking their favorite tunes and dancing around the studio - get work when you had to go through multiple levels of resume BS and hierarchy to get your current job - which is good, but not that good?

You leave the studio wondering what you ran into, how it keeps up like that, and if you might get lucky enough (or unlucky enough if you hate loud music) to get some more work at that studio. For the passing observer, what's going on may seem inexplicable, but for everyone working on the set, it all makes sense.


Working with People who have Infinite Access to You
A corporate workplace is designed to secure access and restrict access to other levels or hierarchy and to restrict the interface of an individual personality with other single personalities. This is the efficiency of modern business - and its insult. You're not treated as an individual and the corporation restricts your contribution to what it designates as your role.

I call this the Professional White Wash. Given how prevelant individual(istic) personality problems such as being difficult and irrelevant, delusions of grandeur and destructive self-absorbtion are, there is certainly a need in large corporate structures to enforce limiting individual input. It's a boring, sad, true necessity - but it keeps a lot of people employed and hobbles along in its own bland way. (Side note: Twentieth Century American urban culture hasn't done a whole lot to advance the populi general into an interesting bunch than say agrarian culture did in the 19th C.) If you've ever had roommate who love to light up your life with their drama, their details, their personal quirk of leaving dishes unwashed in the sink for a week, you know professionalism and accountability in modern life, on some of the most basic levels in your most important relationships, is fundamental to smooth day-to-day functioning. It's impossible to say the corporate order is completely senseless.

And it is impossible to say photographers with off-the-hook crews are all good for business. For one, someone's going to come through that door who might not like the experience of James Brown - and if it weren't for getting the undercurrent of "Getting the Job Done," such activity could be unbearable. Additionally, the 'party aesthetic' of Paris Hilton and bling bling culture bookending an increasingly rich/poor society of winners and losers has crippled the imagination of a generation of Americans with just-add-water instant Rock Star aspirations traded in (without much hard-won thought it seems) for dreams of astronaut, President, fire fighter or lawyer keeping corporations in line. The current aspirational model is all about how you see yourself in the world and whether that idea can fit in a huge white font across the ass of your sweat shorts.


What You Might Be Missing: The Work
Back to James Brown: Three elements control this situation.
1. The nature of the photo studio in this example is such that there the boss must interact with everyone working for them. There is no escape. There are no levels of restricted access with the notable exception of the discretion of the staff themselves. This means hiring people with sympatico personalities is a serious priority for the photographer - as it is for the Art Buyer to find sypatico photographers to work with his Art Directors, etc.

2. To achieve this level of sympatico ('pahoda' - a sense of well-being within a room), each person on set knows themselves well enough to accurately gauge the basic needs ('frame of mind'?) of the other people on set. (This is different than knowing 'what they are thinking.') There is an unspoken agreement that facilitating work includes being aware of the conditions each person on set needs to work. I believe this is an ethical agreement towards the goal of work.

3. Throughout the room, the professionalism in attaining goals is so well established (ideally, each player has set aside those aspects of personality which obstruct others) and so well maintained, moments like these can arise spontaneously. Where it appears all professional standards have been suspended - and that it's all a big party - what you are looking at is a sophisticated level of assurance that the work flow is going well. The photographer has set a tone of sharing and openness that frees the workers on set to periodically transcend the work that's right in front of them, and that's good for morale.

And since you're a model, you maybe aware there are 8 working hours you will not be at the studio. To you, it may appear it's always like this, but it waxes and wanes like any other work place. You just happen to be lucky (or unlucky) enough to hit the crescendo. But the work flow has been worked out from dawn to the final denouement, job after job on the crew - and that plan includes a lot of work, accountability and attention in a variety of chaotic circumstances.