Global Visionaries: How Wonderful Content's Cultural Capital is Shaping the Future of Production
“Cultural Capital” is what we refer to as the accumulation of information and knowledge gained through our on-the-ground production experience. Since Wonderful Content’s birth in 2013, we have been finessing cultural idiosyncrasies and respectfully harnessing these learnings in the name of high quality production.
There is a very human aspect to producing, and working across borders requires an additional level of understanding in regards to the nuances of cultural best practices. For over two decades we have been filming and producing in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Colombia, as well as maintaining a decade-long partnership in Sweden, and more recently, producing agreements in the UK and Italy. Over the years we have paved a smoother path for both the logistical process of projects and the creative one. As a result, Wonderful Content embodies Cultural Capital both as it pertains to IP and creativity, and to logistics and guiding our clients.
At Wonderful, we develop multiple original stories - from features to series - and our Cultural Capital gives us the ability to harness the talents of diverse directors, writers, producers, and designers from different parts of the world. In doing so, we are consciously and actively learning, selecting, and being attuned to what each idea, culture, and way of thinking, provides for the collective arsenal of knowledge of a project. Understanding the creative side of Cultural Capital also means knowing how to navigate certain situations and when to illustrate universal, non cultural-dependent aspects of a story – those that connect with everybody, everywhere.
Logistically speaking, for the brands, ad agencies, and studios who hire us and our directors, our ability to harness the Cultural Capital grants us a valuable and insightful perspective. We can analyse the multi-dimensional challenges of a project, analyse how best to work them, and arrive at a proposal that considers the creative, logistical, and budget challenges.
Culture In-Camera
Leveraging both these aspects of Cultural Capital has proven to be the difference between a smooth or difficult shoot. Our nuanced understanding has proven extremely beneficial time and again, as we know the level of malleability a place, team, and project has.
Over the last decade we have immersed ourselves in numerous experiences that have proven instrumental in forging our cultural literacy within the industry. Aside from our official teams in the US and Canada, we have teams in Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as what we call “partners-at-large” in Europe who have also been working with us for over 23 years.
Together, we have overcome every feasible production challenge. During Covid-19’s international border closures, and country-wide lockdowns for CITI and AmericanAirlines, our multicultural capabilities enabled us to facilitate permissions from the Italian government to enter Italy, and film in multiple cities.
We have negotiated with military and political leaders to obtain permission to transport military equipment, tanks, and Humvees in Argentina, for a Sony project. This would not have been possible were it not for our on-the-ground understanding of a touchy part of South American history.
On another occasion we were able to obtain permission from Colombia’s Sierra Nevada Kogi people and, more precisely, from their “Mamas” (spiritual leaders). We spent time with them, sharing coca leaves with burned seashell powder, and this eventually led to reaching consensus to shoot a documentary in the Sierra Nevada area.
Elsewhere, our team successfully bridged immense cultural differences during the filming of a Scandinavian TV drama series, “Springfloden”, where the cast and crew was a mix of Swedish, Danish, Spanish, American, and Costa Ricans. By managing expectations and stereotypes, Wonderful Content acted not only as producers but as diplomats who learned the tension points and then wrapped this understanding within a firm velvet glove to maintain cohesion when things became tense.
For every one of these projects, as well as copious others not mentioned, our Cultural Capital proved invaluable and each project would have been almost impossible without it.
We represent, in many cases, the same directors as our European partners, for different markets, and are always on the lookout for new and interesting talent. We maintain a strong, coherent creative culture between our offices and partners-at-large as well as our directors by ensuring we are engaged in ongoing conversations, aiding each other in bids, and assisting in presentations or treatments. Although we are geographically dispersed, we maintain constant contact, sharing a constant flow of creative ideas. We function as one team without stepping on each other’s toes and avoiding an “Us vs Them” mentality at all costs. Our team has worked together since 2000, and we are all highly fluent in the meaning of Cultural Capital, which makes the process of working together seamless and instinctive.
In the end, we are here to produce stories written, designed, and performed by humans for humans. And we will always be driven by the hope that, regardless of cultural or language barriers, the stories we tell nurture a viewer’s deeper understanding of our shared human experiences.
