Episode 31

Vetting and Managing Talent (ft. Impossible Studios)

Maddy O’Shaughnessy has produced commercials in more countries than most people visit in a lifetime: the US, the UK, Budapest, Barcelona, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, and, most recently, Uruguay. As an executive producer at Impossible Studios, a full-service production house in Toronto, she has shot and produced work for brands like Buick, Dove, and Shoppers Drug Mart, with earlier stops at agencies including Ogilvy and Momentum.

In this episode she joins Dario and Kyrill for a tactical look at how big-budget commercial production actually gets staffed: how to build a team of directors, DPs, and production companies you have never worked with, the exact questions that separate a real operator from a risky hire, why a budget and a reel each tell only half the story, and how the whole industry keeps bending to fit new platforms, from the 15 second TV cut down to the seven second TikTok.

Timestamps

Building a Team Across Borders

Maddy’s work regularly spans continents. A recent commercial sent her to Uruguay to finally meet, in person, a team she had only ever worked with over Zoom during the pandemic, and a single project might pull a director from one country and a crew from another. Most producers lean on their own trusted networks and the people they already know, an instinct the show has explored in growing and investing in your team. When Maddy needs talent she has never worked with, the first path is still word of mouth: a director someone trusts who has worked in that region before. When that runs out, she is candid about the fallback. She will Google production companies in the country, or find people through Instagram, and then get them on a vetting call. Coordinating that kind of far-flung team is a theme the show has returned to before, including the realities of running production without everyone in the same room in how to be a fully remote producer.

How to Vet Talent You Have Never Met

The vetting call is where a stranger becomes a trusted hire. On the production side, Maddy asks concrete, job-specific questions: Do you use the same budgeting system? Can you walk me through a pre-production meeting? Do you have access to this camera, these lenses, a drone operator if the shoot calls for one? On the creative side, the director gets a separate call with the creative team, who probe whether they truly understand the brief. For directors and production companies on a big-budget job, nothing is awarded on a reel and a handshake. There is a full treatment, multiple calls, and a line-by-line review of the estimate before anyone signs off. It is the same instinct that drives a client vetting a vendor, which is exactly why understanding how to choose a video production company and when you need a company versus a solo videographer matters on both sides of the table.

Why a Budget Tells You Almost Everything

One of Maddy’s most useful discoveries from working internationally is how little budgets change from country to country. Impossible uses a template called point zero, the US equivalent is Hot Budgets, and almost everywhere she goes the line items are the same and sit in the same places. So when a new production company sends over a budget she can read at a glance, it is an instant signal that they know what they are doing. For anyone on the buying side trying to make sense of where the money goes, Lapse breaks down the same territory in its guide to how much a video costs and the wider corporate video production process.

You Cannot Hire on the Reel Alone

Everyone agrees on the trap. A reel is a highlight of someone’s best work, and it says nothing about consistency, or about how involved that person really was on the projects shown. Dario and Kyrill share a lesson from their own early days: hiring a creative narrative DP for a corporate shoot, then realizing only afterward that narrative and corporate are two very different disciplines. The fix they landed on, and one Maddy echoes, is to always ask for examples that match the job in front of you. A director who can cut a gorgeous two minute film may still not be able to tell a complete story in 15 seconds, which is what most commercials actually demand today. The show dug deeper into hiring for demonstrated experience rather than a shiny reel in experience-based hiring and AI tools.

Cheap Talent, DP Red Flags, and Day Rates

The biggest risk lives on the smaller-budget jobs, because the person willing to work for very little is the bigger gamble. When Dario and Kyrill put out talent calls, they look for day rates in the range they know real professionals charge. A bid to shoot an entire commercial for a fraction of that is a red flag, not a deal. Maddy adds a specific tell she watches for on a DP’s reel: if every spot is shot outside, it can mean they never learned to light an interior. Green screen is another niche to respect, so do not claim it unless you have really done it. If you are trying to benchmark what fair looks like, Lapse maintains a detailed guide to videographer day rates, and a shoot that needs aerials is its own specialty covered in drone video production.

Making Content for Every Platform

The back half of the conversation turns to how much the deliverable landscape has fragmented. A single campaign now has to live as a 16:9 TV spot, a 4:5 and 1:1 for feeds, and a 9:16 vertical, and each platform eats into the usable frame differently, so shots have to be composed with all of them in mind. TikTok is the trickiest: its 9:16 is subtly taller than Instagram’s, seven seconds tends to outperform, and trending audio drives the reach. Impossible’s answer is to bring someone out specifically to shoot native TikTok content, and to plan for a shoot-day-plus-one-week turnaround rather than a three month campaign, because a trend does not wait. Getting found across those platforms is its own discipline, which the YouTube SEO playbook and the show’s episode on how social media is changing video both dig into.

The Future: VR, AR, and Rolling With Change

The episode closes on where all this is heading. Maddy is bullish on VR as a creative playground and skeptical that Facebook’s metaverse push will be the thing that makes it mainstream. The barriers to entry are still too high, and, as the hosts note, every extra step you ask an audience to take to view your content is a step most of them will not take. AR gets a warmer reception as the more likely near-term winner. What they all agree on is the constant: every new platform forces even the biggest studios to adapt, and the teams that thrive are the ones willing to roll with the punches. For a current look at where the technology is pushing the craft next, the show explored generative tools in Sora and the future of video production.

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About

Creatives Grab Coffee is a podcast about the business behind video production: sales, strategy, pricing, team building, and everything that happens off camera. New episodes every week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Lapse Productions is a Toronto-based video production company serving tech, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing clients with corporate, promotional, event, and testimonial video. New to commissioning video? Start with our guide to the types of corporate video.

Impossible Studios is an independent full-service production house in Toronto, representing award-winning directors and photographers across commercial, brand, and editorial work. At the time of this episode, Maddy O’Shaughnessy was an executive producer at the studio, with a career that has taken her to shoots across the US, the UK, Europe, and beyond. Learn more at impossiblestudios.tv.