Overcoming a challenge

Overcoming a challenge

At the height of the Covid crisis, I received a video link from my brother.  He’s an actor based in the US and had some time on his hands because his industry had shut down.  Together with his wife, daughter, and some friends, they recorded Tennessee Williams’ stage play, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Zoom.  When I watched this, I thought that I could do something similar to bring one of my coaching products, The 5 Chairs, to life (after all, how hard can pressing ‘record’ be on Zoom?).

I can be pretty persuasive and the first thing I did was to sell this vision to my business partner, Amanda, to Maxwell (my brother), and to Louise Evans, who is the creator of The 5 Chairs.  I also enlisted the help of my friend, Meagan, who has a background in comms.  About this time, the BBC released a show called Staged.  It felt like divine intervention, as this show is based in the Zoom environment and gave me even more ideas about how we could produce our little videos.  I was extremely excited and set about bringing the crew together.

Lesson number one – “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage”.  Maxwell pointed out that we didn’t have a script! (Apparently, an actor needs a script – who would thought?).  Fortunately, Amanda had a friend who is a TV scriptwriter, and so our crew (as well as our budget!) expanded.  Several weeks later, we had a script.  We were back on track…

Lesson number two – Zoom is not TV.  Meagan, who had generously offered production support, realised that our script was too complex for the systems she had available to her and that we now needed a professional editing agency.  She connected us with several companies, and this is how we met Josh of Jaygo Creative.  Once again, our crew (and our budget) grew.

Lesson number three – If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Our budget has tripled, the time frame quadrupled, and at times my sanity halved throughout this process. What we have though is an amazing product that our scriptwriter, Chris of Sidekick Pictures, and Josh have independently of one another said could win an award.

Lesson number four – You can’t do this alone. None of this would have been possible without the incredible support, patience, and willingness of Charina who kept us all on track. Charina of Global Teams, project managed us, no small feat, given that she lives in the Philippines our actor is in the US, Louise is in Italy and the rest of us are here in Australia!

We start filming next week, so the challenges are unlikely to be over just yet.  I feel hugely blessed that my family, friends, and colleagues (old and new) have bought into this vision and made it their own.  It has been a true collaboration, with everyone’s views and opinions helping to make this the amazing production it is set to be.

I can’t wait to share the trailer with you… Watch this space.