Producing Tomorrow's Producers: Staying Calm, Cool and Collected with Halie Graham
Halie hails from Georgia where she got her start at SCAD and caught the production bug. With a background in fine art and design, she takes creativity to every bid, chat, and board. After starting in fashion then sports at Time Inc., she crash landed in tabletop production and has been marinating in 'bots and rigs' ever since. Driven with a deep understanding of line production, she has taken a modern approach to EP'ing that can often be felt in the hallowed halls of The Garage.
LBB> What advice would you give to any aspiring producers or content creators hoping to make the jump into production?
Halie> Treat your crew well, get to know them and they’ll always have your back. Also, it’s easy to get frantic when you start out in production when things go wrong or with additional client asks. A stressed/frantic/loud producer will ruin the mood of the shoot and rubs off on everyone else. Even if you need to go scream in the stairwell, always keep your cool on set.
LBB> What skills or emerging areas would you advise aspiring producers to learn about and educate themselves about?
Halie> Good producers do the work. Great producers have creative opinions and know how to gently place them with the director to get the most out of the project. This is to say, develop your taste palette. Look at work, all of the time. Know the difference between bad/good/great work and how to guide your team to get there.
LBB> What was the biggest lesson you learned when you were starting out in production - and why has that stayed with you?
Halie> If you did your job as a producer, you should be able to sit back and relax on the shoot. You never will, but it’s just a way to say that you should have accounted for everything ahead of time. We aren’t doing brain surgery on set, we aren’t curing cancer. Stay calm, cool, collected and solve the issues.
LBB> When it comes to broadening access to production and improving diversity and inclusion what are your team doing to address this?
Halie> Part of the issue is that a specific type of person has been given most of the resources in this field to succeed and thus, it’s easy to hire the person with the biggest resume. For me and my team, I’m allocating additional funds to bring in diverse crew so that we can elevate them by on set teaching. If we’re just hiring PAs that check the “diversity hire” box, we will never fix anything. We must be willing to give the resources to other ethnicities to grow their career that white people have been given the whole time.
LBB> There are young people getting into production who maybe don’t see the line between professional production and the creator economy, and that may well also be the shape of things to come. What are your thoughts about that? Is there a tension between more formalised production and the ‘creator economy’ or do the two feed into each other?
Halie> I think that we had to start looking at the creator economy as “professional” as soon as they started getting jobs that small production companies used to get. Almost every job has social asks: BTS, TikTok, etc. We have to know how to create that type of content now as well. In the same vein, creators have to learn to think like professionals in the business as well (and many of them do): not underbidding, giving content for free, etc.
Personally, I think each has their own lane and it benefits all of us to understand the other’s skills.
LBB> When it comes to educating producers how does your agency like to approach this? (I know we’re always hearing about how much easier it is to educate or train oneself on tech etc, but what areas do you think producers can benefit from more directed or structured training?)
Halie> I’m always very vocal that I will help anyone with production training whether you work with me or not; you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s so important that producers are learning before calling themselves “producers” as well and it takes years of on-set experience before you learn how to properly handle situations.
There isn’t ways to google “how to be a producer” or "how to solve a production problem" like you could for other roles, almost all of it has to be directed by someone. I don’t think there is a way around this, since there are no cookie cutter solutions for critical thinking on your feet when you’re on set.
LBB> It seems that there’s an emphasis on speed and volume when it comes to content - but to where is the space for up and coming producers to learn about (and learn to appreciate) craft?
Halie> Producers are a very specific type of person, and the good ones all love what they do (or trust me, we would be in other industries). Find these people, and ask them to mentor you. Someone who you can ask the ridiculous questions to and not feel bad. When you’re on set, producers are busy and most likely don’t have the bandwidth to teach, you’ll need to put in the time with them offset. Also start off as an office PA, and ask questions!!
LBB> Clearly there is so much change, but what are the personality traits and skills that will always be in demand from producers?
Halie> Critical thinking, always. Adaptability. A touch of OCD. Kindness. Work ethic. Passion for the industry.
