My Biggest Lesson: Tom Vaughan-Mountford
Tom Vaughan-Mountford is the production director of the long-established DRTV commercial production company JMS Group. 30-second commercials are his area of expertise, but his sympathetic understanding of the inner wranglings of client bureaucracy stem from a lengthy career in corporate video communications.
My biggest lesson in a nutshell: Maintain the self-awareness to sense when my objectivity is becoming clouded.
This lesson was imparted around 2008, I was a senior video editor with eight years in the game. Experienced, but still a little hot-headed. Knowledgeable enough to do good work, but young enough to think I knew it all.
At that time our business was moving away from long-form corporate video production and going full tilt into television advertising. We still retained one behemoth of a corporate client, for whom I was compiling a mammoth motion graphics project: a rousing opening fanfare piece for a major conference. Much of the information that was being fed into the graphics was time-sensitive market data, and it was being sent to me in drips at the eleventh hour. The deadline was closing in fast. Back then I was rendering the After Effects composition - hundreds of layers - on a single Macintosh G5. The rendering times were excruciating. So, I settled in for the night, ordered fish and chips, and chugged coffee and Red Bull until dawn.
9am comes around, and the clients swing by the office to sign off on the video. I was knackered, bloodshot eyes, ready for bed. I tapped the spacebar, and we began the viewing. All things considered, I honestly thought I’d done an outstanding job. I spun around in my chair and looked at the client’s head honcho – an industry heavyweight who really knew his stuff – expecting a thumbs-up, possibly even a round of applause. Instead, silence. Followed by a furrowed brow. Followed by a slow sigh. Oh god, this didn’t bode well.
“I can’t show that. It doesn’t work. It’s all going far too fast, there’s not time to read any of the text.”
My brain was fried, and I honestly wanted to slosh the client. But being terribly British I opted to passive-aggressively drop my pen on the desk with a dramatic flourish. I fired back with, “I was here all night working on this!”
Oh, no. Had I gone too far? Bloody hell, was he going to kick-off? Walk out?
The client paused, gathered his thoughts, and calmly said, “And I really do appreciate your work. But seeing this cold for the first time, it’s wrong, and it’s going to be changed.”
Wow. Profound. I felt deflated, justly bollocked, and yanked round to the client’s perspective. I didn’t even try to fight my corner; there was no denying I had become blind to critiquing my own work. I’m sure we’ve all griped about a client who has got ‘too close to the project’ that it has clouded their objectivity, but on this occasion the tables were turned, and I was rightly humbled. I spent the rest of the day rebuilding the composition at half the speed, and the client’s opinion was proved to be spot-on.
I’ve thought about that project many times down the years. Whether you’re the client, with the agency, or in production – there’s a universal truth: Never get so wrapped up in the process of making something that you don’t take the time to stand back and objectively evaluate. Since that project I’ve made it part of my process to regularly take a half hour away from a piece of work, open to the possibility that when I return the best way ahead might be to scrub everything and start over.
