This question produced a wide range of conflicting results. A quick summation might read the idea team member would be a self-motivated specialized generalist who is easy to work with and can be left alone with the client. Suffice it to say, we all need a magician on our teams.

Featured responses:

1. Self-Discipline
2. Networking, Programming
   Time Management
   Being a good person and eager to help
3. Technical Acumen
   Understanding of Priorities.
4. Reliability and Trust
   Strong Work Ethic
   Anticipation of Client Demands
5. Self-sufficient problem solving abilities
   Strong communication skills
   Technical ability
6. Leadership
   Ownership
   Responsible
   Pro Active
   Engagement
   Creative
7. After Effects
   3D modeling
   UV unwrapping
8. Collaboration
   Team-oriented creative problem solving
   Flexibility
   Trust
   Content workflow management
   File management
   Honesty
9. People who are pretty good at a lot of different things and easy to get along with under all kinds of pressures
10. Ability to see the forest for the trees and keep an eye on deadlines and the broader team
11. Troubleshooting
    Calm under pressure
    Clear headed communication without jumping to conclusions or leading others in the wrong direction (unintentionally)
    Being able to “read the room” (lots of hotheaded folks)
12. Enjoy obtaining deep-dive product knowledge to support onboarding clients.
    Strong client communication skills.
    Ownership of a project / task
    Strong delivery and target goal hunting!

This question brought very similar responses, with most respondents highlighting the lack of client understanding on time required, cost, and complexity of creative pixel production. There were a few respondents who saw this issue as a feature, and part of their ability to earn and retain clients.

Featured responses:

1. Most of it! The complexity and layers of inter-dependent components. The impact of content on performance and hardware and vice-versa. The amount of planning necessary for success is still something most people get wrong.
2. Why it takes so much time and why an AI can’t do it.
3. How little they know – client education is the #1 consideration when starting a project. It will help level set so that they aren’t expecting something that can’t be delivered.
4. Everything takes time to program, refine and test. Double the people don’t finish the job in half the time.
5. Everything. They definitely do not understand the difficulty of changes at times, or the amount of work that really goes into a project.
6. The nature of bespoke creative endeavors.
7. Almost everything, which is fine, we are here to help.
8. You’re not just managing one team; you are constantly working with other disciplines to understand any impact any change has on the other teams and the project overall. Fast answers are not easy.
9. Do my clients understand anything about my work other than that it must result in a manner that suits them?
10. Often I feel like clients think of me as more of a facilitator than a collaborative member of the team. They don’t understand that my primary job is working as a storyteller.
11. How many steps there are from beginning to end. It’s a lot more complex than I make it seem. That is a good thing for the artists to encourage them to get involved in the dreamy creative process, and a stressful thing if they underestimate the time it takes to deliver changes and new pieces of content.This is always the fine line I’m walking.
12. The time frame, risks and cost of true innovation.

There were a wonderful variety of insights contained within these responses. Here is a selection that covers many of the dominant themes for this question.

Featured responses:

1. Video hardware and signals as well as color science. Also media servers and alternate methods of playback. My experience so far has been that young new professionals have a great understanding of unreal and its interface but may have blind spots in basic 3D / VFX concepts and then how that applies to the very digital but also very physical world of virtual production.
2. For screens, just how many people it can take to get from idea to delivery. Not only that, but we often straddle a technical and creative role and defining that not only per project, but also per part of project can be difficult for some.
3. Networking. Both in terms of actual system networking and human connection networking.
4. That mistakes are ok to make and need to happen in a safe space so innovation can happen.
5. The basics of other departments and their needs… We need to understand why audio engineers might want to listen to the media server output again and again. Or why the media server now needs to adhere to the light engineers IP Range.
6. Learning a software to create and learn a different software to playback videos is simple. Understanding why and how to work with others is the hard part.
7. The complexity and the hard job that there is behind a show. Starting from day 1 load in till load out.
8. It’s a long and constant learning curve.
9. The multi disciplinary aspect of it.
10. Quality communication is important. Use the right tool to communicate accurately and quickly. Learn how to use a phone. Learn how to manage inter-disciplinary teams IRL and steer the conversation towards understandable answers, agreements, and actions.
11. Adapting to multiple different creative directions project-to-project, and understanding how to piece together many different approaches to find the most efficient and effective approaches. Many people want to stay put using one particular software for example.
12. Relationships are everything.
13. The complete complexity of it all and the vast amount of products and technology available today. It’s very difficult to understand and sometimes justify what is the proper product or solution for a given job.
14. The time it takes to be trusted
15. The amount of mistakes that almost feel required to advance. It’s hard to explain the complexity to new folks and how to teach the process properly – it’s mostly how to be resilient and that things always go wrong even with the best planning. Also how to best be aware of what the other project teams need and prioritize and how to best support them in their efforts instead of prioritizing just their work.
16. How complicated it is to create something simple.
17. That they’re not expected to know everything. Learning and asking for help is a natural part of growth, being comfortable with the unknown is also critical to being successful, but you always need a plan a, b, c for how to react. Also interpersonal skills are critical to the success of work, being able to establish rapport with your team makes all the difference.
18. The fast pace and speed things get made then thrown away, before the final product is then built in half the time.
19. Methodical problem solving. Hard days come with good days – sometimes jobs are long and tiring, and that’s just life. You have to maintain a good attitude.
20. The sheer breadth of fields, topics, and software needed to be successful in the field today.

Finding new clients can be a challenge, trusting them is another. We appear to all look for the humanity of our partners in our work. 

Featured responses:

1. We always try to select projects against 2 of 3 criteria: 1) is it well paid, 2) will it help our portfolio, and 3) will it be fun to work on?
   Red flags are often when none of this criteria is met. I really dislike when clients promise us future work if we take on the “red flag” project first.
2. Lack of resources, lack of commitment, lack of team.
3. Lack of or late communication. Lofty titles or awards listed in their email footer. Someone coming from an advertising agency. Asking to have singular members of a team, or treating us like a staffing agency. Top heavy, too many cooks, not enough actual doers or decision makers.
4. Not understanding or deliberately undervaluing the human element. The fancy gear is just metal and plastic without sufficient skilled labor.
5. Client red flags for me often come when discussing the business aspect of things, whether it is budget, payment schedule, legal contract, or how they discuss the project. Often recently there is a big push to have less people onsite and on location for delivering a project, especially with content, and hoping to have a “Notch guy” there to just make changes by themselves. It’s a tricky business and there are often things that are associated incorrectly or very out of date (Content budgets that are earmarked for a tour might be based off of costs 10+ years ago, etc). Other red flags include early on when discussing creative notes, if creative is wildly shifting without discussions about logistics or what that might mean, or an overall undervaluing of the team involved and their schedule.
6. Lack of planning and lack of understanding communicated requirements.
7. A lack of empathy for both proper compensation for the team as well as a healthy work/life balance.
8. When they want you to just throw ‘something’ up on the screen, or they ask for something they’ve seen on television or in a movie but they don’t understand the technology needed or the cost.
9. Asking to pitch.
10. Low Budget High Exceptions, “Can’t you just use AI?”
    Disconnects between budget and the volume of screens.
    Disconnects between creative directors and management.
11. The beer budget with the champagne expectations.
12. Stinginess on labor budgets
    Lack of transparency in budget/scope
    Pronoun misusage
    Mistreatment of/low percentage of women in the room
    Mistreatment of/low percentage of non-binary/gender nonconforming people in the room
    Word of mouth from others
    High turnover/constantly changing staff
13. Vague descriptions that are later followed by very specific demands. “”I’ll know it when I see it.””
    Planning and budgeting for the minimum, but expecting the maximum.
14. Communicating late, lack of trust

We love the challenges and the magic we creative for our audiences. We love the the community we build making that magic.

Featured responses:

1. Collaboration, and knowing people will see the work!
2. The people I work with. I believe people in this business are the smartest, most adaptive and generally understanding people in any creative business.
3. Creating beautiful images. Helping the team deliver the best they can.
4. The creative process and when a good deal is working beyond expectation.
5. Creativity and Innovation
6. Communicating complex concepts and details with smart people, collaborating and making things happen and enjoying the friendships that emerge from doing that over and over under lots of pressure.
7. The variety of the work and the people. Every show is a unique challenge, screen configuration and level of creative. Its one of the few industries that is constantly growing and changing and opening up endless possibilities for creative production. Also the road family is the best. You get to travel and have so many people from around the world in your life. Not many people can say that. I also love watching a show come together. The satisfaction of it and the release you get when its over is something you can’t really measure or describe fully…its just a feeling.
8. My favorite part of work is creating new examples for clients to help give them a concrete way to learn a new aspect of a workflow, which can then be used for other clients later and for my own personal learning along the way.
9. We do something different every day.
10. Seeing it all come together.
11. Creation.
12. The creative process
    The amazing people we collaborate with
    Every project has a unique set of challenges
    Love developing designs or creative with a team who engages in Constructive criticism
13. Community
14. Once everything falls into place the way we imagined it! Usually happens by the second rehearsal and it’s that moment where you “did we just do a show?!”
15. Supporting a team of colleagues and collaborators to bring a story to an audience.
16. When I get to interface between designers or large design concepts and technology to make the 2 work for each other.
    Also just how incredibly varied the work such a niche set of skills can get me.
17. Seeing the punters leaving at the end of the gig looking like they’ve had the time of their lives
18. The showbiz magic! The look on people’s faces during the first show and the artist’s excitement afterward. I love that.
19. Learning new things
20. Working with teams of intelligent, creative people
21. Conceptualization, watching people interact with the final product, creative technical solutions
22. Solving difficult problems.