Creative Producer playbook.

Creative producer is the slate. You decide what projects exist, which ones get finished, and which ones get quietly dropped so the good ones get the crew. Deciding what not to make is half of it, and it's the half nobody enjoys.

Director is the look. When you're on a set you own the frame, the performance, and the standard. When you're not directing, you still own the standard — which means giving other people notes on their work and being right often enough that they keep asking.

Before anything gets shot, there should be a written list of what we're making this year. Not in your head. Written, where the line producer can read it, because she can't schedule what she can't see.

For each project, three lines is enough to start:

• What it is — one sentence. If it takes a paragraph, it isn't a project yet, it's a mood.
• What it's for — a specific competition category, the school, or a club. "For the reel" is not a purpose and those are the projects that die in October.
• Who's on it — a director and an editor, minimum. A project with no named editor does not get finished. This is a law, not an observation.

The competitions we enter have fixed dates and fixed categories, and they are the most useful creative constraint you have. "Make something great" is paralysing; "make a two-minute PSA that meets these rules by February" is a plan.

1. Read the competitions pages properly — they're split into short chapters for exactly this. Start with what you can enter and the dates that matter.
2. Pick your categories before you develop the idea. The rules determine runtime, crew size, and whether you can use music you didn't make. Discovering that after the edit is how good films get disqualified.
3. Work backwards from the deadline. Locked edit two weeks early, not two days. Something always goes wrong in export.
4. Check the pre-submission rules the week you start, not the week you finish. A genuinely good film scores zero if the file is named wrong, and that has happened to schools better funded than us.

You'll be telling friends their work isn't there yet. Do it badly and they stop showing you cuts, which means you stop being able to do the job at all. Three habits:

• Talk about the work, never the person. "This scene loses me at 40 seconds" — not "you paced this badly."
• Be specific enough to act on. "It feels off" is useless. "The music comes in before we understand who she is" is a note someone can actually fix.
• Lead with the one thing that matters most. Fifteen notes and a person fixes none of them. One note and they fix it tonight.

And say what's working, honestly and specifically. Not as a cushion — so they know what to protect when they recut.

This is the most important working relationship in the program, and the one most likely to turn into an argument. The split is clean:

• You decide what and how it looks. Story, casting, shots, cut, sound.
• She decides when and with whom. Dates, call times, who is on which crew, what gear is available.

So if you're arguing about a shot, it's your call. If you're arguing about whether Thursday works, it's hers — and "but I need it" doesn't override a scheduling reality. Escalate to Mr. Rivers only when it's genuinely a program decision, which is rarer than it feels in the moment.

Not "good for high school." That standard produces work that only plays to a room that already likes you. Use these instead:

• It holds someone who doesn't know you, all the way through, with no explanation first.
• The sound is clean. Bad audio reads as amateur faster than any picture problem, and it's the cheapest thing to get right.
• It couldn't have been made by anyone else. If it's a copy of something you like, it'll be a worse version of it.
• It got finished. An unfinished masterpiece scores the same as nothing.

Curious what has cleared that bar before? Our nominations and results are on the competitions pages, credits and all.