Removing the ‘Im’ from Impossible

How do you do things that can’t be done?

When Fox TV bought the rights to a Latin American Telenovela, a type of a television serial drama or soap opera that was being shot in San Diego, I was hired to work on it.

An episodic TV series is a 1-hour show, airing one night a week for a 13-week season.
A Telenovela is a 1-hour, show airing five (!!?!!) nights a week for an 18-week season.

When I arrived in San Diego to begin pre-production on this staggering 90-episode project with a fixed network delivery date, the people already involved were in freak-out mode trying to figure out how to deal with more material than any movie ever made.

And none of them were willing to tell the Fox executives that it just couldn’t be done because failure before even starting just wasn’t an option.

What saved this project from hell was our collective confidence in our ability to get shit done using all the skills and experience we’d acquired and honed shooting movies and TV shows in the past. 

By creating an authentic collaboration that had no ego limitations and was focused on flexibility around ways to modify what we already knew and use it here in a new and different way.

By seeing the connections between other projects and this one and having the ability to discern what was the same and what was different and knowing what could work and what wouldn’t.

And by using that knowledge coupled with our experience to present the Fox executives with workable solutions and express our confidence in their implementation.

- We hired three people from Columbia experienced in scheduling the massive number of scenes that were shot on telenovelas

- We created a system for lighting for all the sets to be able to shoot scenes without relighting for each one

- We reinvented the camera positions to minimize the number of angles necessary to fully cover all the dialog

- We had equipment manufactured to facilitate multiple cameras shooting different actors at the same time

- We built areas adjacent to the sets for the make-up, wardrobe, and props departments to avoid needing to take the actors to and from trailers 

-And we managed to get it done on time and pretty much on budget by reinventing the wheel, and went on to make five more of them.


So I’m not talking about ‘you got this, girl’ or ‘thinking out of the box’ or ‘let’s get this done, team’ or any of those empty platitudes we parrot to each other and ourselves that provide comfort or reassurance or even motivation without actually providing any viable solutions. 

I’m talking about having confidence in ourselves, our skills, and our experience to see things with new eyes and come up with unconventional ways of problem-solving in an environment of authentic and ego-free creativity that engenders the respect of the gatekeepers or bosses we’re working for and inspires them to implement our solutions because we've shown them their potential for success.

Our collective confidence in our abilities, our willingness to modify our approach, our insistence on authentic collaboration, and our refusal to accept failure before we started allowed us to overcome the challenge of shooting this unprecedented project that Hollywood said couldn’t be done.

What do they know anyway? Hollywood Shmollywood 😆