I thought I was being hired to direct films

For a long time I thought I was being hired to direct films. It took me the best part of twenty years to work out I was being hired to make creative decisions.

Where it started

I started young. Making films at school, then producing at BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra at sixteen, looking after shows and working with presenters. I also worked on internal communications for the BBC, which meant sitting with senior leadership as a teenager and turning what executives meant into something a team could actually make. I didn’t know it then, but that was the job I’d end up doing.

I had good people paying attention. Jamal Edwards at SBTV watched my early work and gave me notes, which shaped a lot of how I thought about the music industry. The first music video I made was a piece of college work. It’s past ten million views now and it’s deeply embarrassing, so good luck finding it.

From there it was music and commercials. Music videos in Vietnam, productions in Bollywood including work for Amazon Prime and Coke Studio, and productions in Japan. Videos for Sam Smith, Rudimental, David Guetta and Becky Hill. Campaigns for Apple, Barclays, Beats and Amazon. Somewhere north of 500 million views, though nobody counts these things properly.

Alongside the directing came years in artist development, shaping early work into packages that helped acts land six and seven figure record deals. Not filming what already existed. Building the thing that made someone worth signing. I’ve mentored filmmakers too, some of whom are now considerably bigger than me. That’s the part I’m most pleased about.

On paper, a directing career. In practice, the part that mattered was rarely the filming.

What the job actually was

On a music video the camera is the least of it. Somebody has to decide what the video is about, which of the six people in the room gets listened to, what gets cut when the money runs short at three in the afternoon, and when something that looks fine isn’t good enough. The filming is how those decisions become visible.

Commercials made it clearer. A brand would hire me for the shoot, but the most useful conversations happened before anyone picked up a camera. The brief was half formed. The client wanted two things that couldn’t both be true. Sometimes the idea itself was the problem, and everyone in the room knew it except the person paying for it.

The turn

What changed things was working with a founder-led business over years rather than weeks.

On a one-off job you hand over the film and leave. You never find out whether it worked. Embedded in a business, you see what happens next. Which pieces moved anything. Which ones looked great and did nothing. How much of what goes wrong with creative work has nothing to do with the creative.

Over five years that business grew its revenue tenfold. Some of that was the films. More of it was the positioning, the team we built, the standard we held, and making sure every piece of work pointed the same way as the business. The films were the visible part of a lot of decisions most people never saw.

That’s when I stopped thinking of myself as a director who sometimes advised, and started seeing it the other way round.

What founders actually need

Founders are pulled in every direction. Sales, finance, hiring, operations, growth, and somehow the creative side as well. Most aren’t short of people who can make things. What’s missing is someone who owns the standard.

The pattern I see constantly: the people at the top know what they want but can’t quite put it into words, so it goes down half formed. The team then make something perfectly competent that answers the wrong brief. Nobody has done anything wrong and everybody is frustrated. I’ve written more about that gap in where creative work actually goes wrong.

The other thing that’s missing is honesty. Around a successful founder, honest notes dry up. Everyone works for them, wants the next job, or likes them too much to say the last three videos were forgettable. Nobody is lying. They’re just being kind, and kindness with no challenge attached is how good businesses end up with flat work and no idea why.

Where that leaves the filmmaking

I still direct, and I still love it. When there’s a film that matters more than the others, I want to be the one making it.

But filmmaking is a tool now, not the whole job. The job is the deciding: which problem to fix first, what good looks like, who should be in the room, and when to say the honest thing. Long term, embedded, hands on, and never more than a handful of businesses at once.

The short version of how I work is on the About page. These notes are where I’ll write about it properly, every two weeks.