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MONDAY MOTIVATION!: Fake It Till You Make It! · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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I just needed just a little something to kind of crack that door open.
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Why would you fake it till you make it? You fake it because you
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don't have opportunities, because you don't have opportunities or access to things that you
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just wouldn't be able to get any other way. And I'll give you a
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perfect example, my editorial reel. When I was first coming up, I
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got a job working at the largest production company in the Southeast at the time,
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and we did a lot of big commercials and music videos and things like
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that. And I was just a young kid right out of school. I
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must have been twenty one, I think at the time, twenty or something
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like that. And I didn't have any other access to another, any other
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opportunities other than just basically being a tape dubber and or pa on the weekends
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for this production company. Then, slowly but sure, I started learning the
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editing system, the AVID, which is right next door to me, and
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a little by little, I learned how to edit, and I was really
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excited about I don't know, and I found I had a good talent for
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editing, but the kind of footage that I had access to made it look
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like, you know, I was kind of what I was a starting out
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editor. Now, my skill set was much far beyond what the access of
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footage that I had or what my real showed. And that's some mistakes so
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many young editors and young filmmakers in general make is that they put out exactly
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what they have access to. So if they go out and shoot shorts on
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the weekends or you know film, you know, film some fake commercials or
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something with their friends, and you can just tell it's not high end,
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it's not really you know fully, you know, seasoned or polished, And
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when you go out for a job, you lose out because other editors are
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more experienced than they have better reels. They've worked with bigger clients and bigger
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companies, and you know, people want to feel safe when they're hiring people.
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Now. I know for a fact that I saw a lot of editors
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come in and out of my production office, and the ones that had those
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kind of reels never saw the light of day, regardless of how talented they
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might have been. So one day an opportunity arose. We had just acquired
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about four or five different directors over from Europe, and a ton of footage
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came over from that from that by or that our acquisition of directors or representation
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by my production company. So I saw the just wealth of raw footage and
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commercials and logos and music and all this kind of stuff. So I decided,
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without anyone's permission, without anyone's knowing, I just started grabbing that footage
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and digitizing it into the Avid and I started seeing commercials. So I saw
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raw footage dailies for these huge, multimillion dollar commercials, but they were all
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Europeans. So it kind of was amazing because it wasn't like I was taking
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David Fincher's Nike commercial and re editing it and saying, hey, I was
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the editor on this. I was taking European footage that nobody in the States
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really had seen before. But it was super high quality stuff. So I
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just started to put together at commercials fake spec commercials, so we like to
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call them speculation commercials. So I would start editing these commercials, and some
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of them were like, you know, sports drinks and shoes, you know,
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you know, sneakers and other things like that, really big brands,
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but European again, So what I started to do is just take that footage
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edit together and I would up a Nike logo at the end of it,
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and I was like, hey, yeah, I did, that's a Nike
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commercial. And I would grab some amazing music that it was just awesome and
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just put it in there and just edited. Man, and I just went
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for it. And it was again a different time. There was no internet.
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There was internet, but there was no demo reels. You couldn't upload
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anything, so everything was still on VHS tapes at the time. VHS and
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three quarter inch tape DVDs weren't even around at that moment in time. So
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what I did is I started putting together a demo reel and I put together
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a bunch of reels, a bunch of commercials, might be like now Mas
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five or six commercials, all of them with raw footage from these commercials.
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And I just said, hey, this is my demo reel. And then
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I went out into the marketplace as a freelance editor based on that demo wheel.
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And if anyone ever asked me, asked me the question, you know,
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did you you know who did you work for? I'm like, I
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wouldn't lie. I would just say, oh, those are spect commercials.
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But the talent was seen and then all of a sudden, the quality that
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I was able to grab from all that kind of footage gave me a t
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gave me a leg up in the marketplace, and there was just nobody in
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my area down in Miami at the time that was doing that kind of work.
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So all of a sudden, I mean it, literally the very first
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interview I did, I got a job as a freelancer and started doing commercials
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for the local Major League Baseball team, the Marlins, and all this kind
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of stuff. Why because of this speculation commercial, this fake commercial reel that
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I put together. Now, I did all the work, I did everything
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myself, so I was capable of doing it. And that's the big key
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here, guys. I was faking it till I made it. But the
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thing was I was capable with the skill set at that time to be able
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to fake it. I wasn't faking something that I had no I was ever
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going to be able to do, or you know, promising something to this
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client that I wasn't able to bring to the table. And that's where people
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get caught up, and that's where mistakes are made. If I would have
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literally stolen edited commercials by some other editors somewhere else. And I was barely
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you know, being able to run around or work in Avid at that time
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and said, yeah, yeah, I edited those editors. And then you
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get put in front of a client. That's when your entire career locally,
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you know, I would have I would have never been hired again. The
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word would have gone out like this, Alex kid is a bsser and he's
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not good and done. How would my career would have been done? So
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you see the difference between fake it till you make it and then fake it
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till you make it. I have no idea how I'm going to get there.
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I already knew that I could do the job. I just needed just
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a little something to kind of crack that door open. It was starting.
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It was the beginning of the hustle, if you will. And that was
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a great, great example of it. And by the way, I did
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not I barely updated my reel. Those those spots stayed on my demo reel
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probably for about five years. Like I did not remove them because they did
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so well for me. People still, you know, called me on it.
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Even after I had done probably four or five hundred commercials and promos and
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things over the years. I would slowly replace them little by little, but
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I loved them so much and they did so well for me. So now
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all of a sudden, I had a reel of a lot of I had
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a demo reel of a bunch of real spots that I had been working on,
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and then a couple of speculation spots. So no one even asked me
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anymore after a while, because I already had the credibility for it. And
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it's just a way that I got my way up, and I started working
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as an editor, and I was making really, really insane money back in
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the mid nineties because of fake it till you make it. Standiard Standard,
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Standard Standard Standard, standar