A question. A client keeps sending back a creative project with amends. How many times of that kind of back and forth does it take before you start to lose patience, even if you don’t tell the client?

I’ll come back to the question later.

Sign This!

About 15 years ago, I arrived back from lunch with one of my team to find two guys waiting in the reception of our Soho post house, they wished to speak with us. In their hands was a thick A4 document, probably thirty pages in total. They told us they wanted to talk to us about a project and asked if we had time to speak with them. We agreed and went into one of the free post editing suites. They put the document on the coffee table, took out a pen, and said they were unable to say anything until we had signed the document. It was an NDA, the brand was Apple.

We duly signed the document (no we didn’t read it, we had no time, so perhaps one day Apple will come looking for me to claim my kidney) and then listened. They had some creative projects for not-yet-released products and were looking for a suitable creative team to execute the work. Would we like to pitch?

They were asking an Apple fan-boy, err, yes!

We were given a week to create a pitch deck for a presentation we would give at Apple’s London HQ, it could last no longer than 15 minutes. For the next week, myself and a colleague, Helena, took the lead on the presentation document. It went through hundreds of iterations. We researched everything down to the tiniest detail, we even figured out the Apple house style at the time, so the deck would look the best it could. It was stressful and exhilarating in equal measure.

We made the presentation at Apple London HQ on a sunny afternoon in May. The entire meeting lasted 25 minutes and then we spoke for a short while with them. They gave us some feedback about our presentation and explained that excellence was a critical part of Apple’s DNA. They described how a product team would spend weeks pressing the on and off switch of a Mac, until they had decided the press and click was just right. They expected the same attention to detail from us.

We won the pitch. I can’t remember too much about the contract after that, I certainly can’t talk about it, don’t forget the kidney donation document I signed! I do recall that in the building we could never call the client or any of the projects by their real name. We had fun coming up with covert operation names for them. If anyone ever used the name Apple in a team meeting, the room would go silent, death stares would be exchanged, a quick apology was made and we would move on.

Great Work Changes Us

What I do know, is a client like that changes you forever. It’s almost as if you’ve been to a place that you can’t come back from. It can happen in studios as you work alongside a top producer, or mastering engineer. It can happen on sound stages as you assist a top movie mixer, or are part of a movie scoring team. But, it also happens in small freelance home studios, or dubbing suites in our garden room. Excellence has no class system, it can exist in the humblest of set-ups with an unknown client, conversely, it can be absent in a world class studio working with a A list client. Excellence isn’t determined by the size of the budget, it’s found in our attitude to the work we do.

Remember the question at the start of this? One of my clients, whom I’m also pleased to have developed a friendship with over the years, is extremely demanding. It should come as no surprise given the quality of the work they do. They are the top of their game, it’s no accident! Their attention to detail is microscopic, but for those of us touched by their work we all benefit from that demand for excellence. Sometimes we’ve gone through amends that run into double figures, the work goes back and forth, and back again. It can feel exhausting at times.

On a recent call they asked if I ever got fed up and wished it were easier. It was in the context of me telling him how another client was less demanding. Without a second thought I replied; “no, while it can be tough at times to ensure things are as good as we can make them, I want all my clients to be like this.” I think he was genuinely surprised.

Take session musicians, there’s a reason you keep hearing the same people on almost every record you listen to, everyone wants to work with them. People hiring them know that when they get in the room they will not only play a world class performance, everyone will want to play one too. The engineers will want to do their best to make sure they do the performance justice and capture it in every detail, as will the mixer, and the mastering engineer. That’s the addictive power of creative excellence. Iron sharpens iron.

Rise Above The Crowd

One of the greatest challenges to creativity is mediocrity. We see it in every part of the music and post industry today. Too many settle for ‘that will do’ or ‘it’s good enough!’ It’s the effect of the relentless torrent of media coming down the pipe, so how do we make sure we stand out?

In two ways, in terms of the creative content it has to be different from the rest, in the words of Seth Godin and his excellent book, it needs to be a Purple Cow. To shorten the illustration, in a field of regular cows you would soon see a purple cow! This is the paradox of popular culture, it has to be current, and yet somehow different at the same time. Or it has to be from a different place that transcends what everyone is expecting and makes head’s turn.

Originality is the first part of the equation. Excellence is the second. Even if the average member of the public doesn’t know what snare drum, compressor or reverb we’ve used on a mix. Even if they can’t tell the difference between mono and Atmos, they can tell a great voice, an astonishing movie score, or a sublime piano recording. They will certainly notice when the sound isn’t good in a movie theatre or they can’t hear the dialogue on a TV show.

Often our excellence goes unnoticed, sometimes that’s the highest compliment, that our technical skills meant they heard the heart of the song, or were transfixed by the story. As the team at Industrial Light And Magic say; “if they came out of a movie saying how good the special effects were, we had failed.”

Being The Best You!

I’m not as good as many of the people in the field I work, not even close. I’m not even as good as I could be when compared to me. Excellence is a powerful motivator, that when we take seriously, has the power to take the work we do from good to great, and more importantly, to help us be better than we were yesterday.

The next time you lose count at the amount of amends you’ve done on a job and want to scream and wonder if it’s worth it, the answer is simple, it is. That’s irrespective of where you are working and the client you are working for, most of us will never work at Abbey Road or Skywalker, part of the reason most of the teams are there is because they took the path of excellence when they were working in a small room and for lesser known clients.

Working towards excellence is the creative equivalent of circuit training. Each time we do it, we get a little stronger and more in shape. If we keep doing it, we’ll be better than we ever thought possible. We will wake up one day and realise we’ve gone from a creative beer gut to a six pack! And like going to the gym, some days we won’t want to bother trying, but if we do keep at it we’ll achieve work we can be deeply proud of.

A final story, this time about my most demanding boss, my wife! When I’m not staring at screens and thinking about the world of audio technology I like to do DIY and gardening to relax, it’s the most extreme alternative to my day job. It’s outside, requires manual work, and with gardening a lot of the success is out of my hands. This weekend I had to re-oil the wooden porch on the front of our house, stain the side gates and also paint the metal gates at the end of the drive. I finished late on Sunday night and as I was admiring my handy work my wife came down to inspect the gates at the end of the drive. As she told me how good they looked I said; '“no one will know I’ve done this you know?” Without even blinking she replied; “But you’ll know!”

She’s right!