Nick Simkins LIA Diary Wrap-up: In Vegas and in Advertising, Playing it Safe Rarely Wins
Nick Simkins, executive producer at FINCH, Sydney represented Australia on the LIA Production & Post-Production and Music Video jury. Here, Simkins wraps up his experience in Las Vegas exclusively for Campaign Brief.
CHANCES ARE YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE
I’m sure I’ve heard that before somewhere…
Judging an award show in Las Vegas gets you thinking in probabilities. And a whole heap of other shit. There’s so much crazy shit to think about there. But probabilities definitely features.
To start with, the chance of me sitting the row behind my high school alumni Daniel Riccardo (we never met in school, he’s about 400 years younger than I am) was about 1 in 26443. Unlike the selfie seeking Qantas cabin crew, I didn’t sidle up for a chat.
But more relevantly, it got me thinking of when a film project commences – from writing the initial script, nurturing it through presentations, treatments, director selection, pre production, shoot and post, after all those meetings, committees, all the noise. If it ends up in a jury room, survives the round 1 keep/remove cull, then gets rated, another cull, then remains in the mix after rigorous debate and interrogation. If it’s still there on the 4th day of judging, in the conversation for metal? Probability would suggest that for every script that is commenced, very few of them end up part of that discussion. Because it’s fucking hard to win. Genuinely difficult and unlikely.
I thought the broader standard in the early rounds was a bit hit and miss to be honest. There was a lot of average work in there that didn’t make it to the latter rounds. And the music video category was very safe. Where was the type of work that launched Glazer and Gondry and so many great commercial directors? Experimental, challenging work. And despite all agreeing that one piece in particular was very deserving of gold, we couldn’t find a truly outstanding film to award the Grand LIA to in the category this year. But by the time we got to the awarded pieces in the production and post production categories they all felt deserving. What I liked about the awarded films this year were that stylistically they were so varied. And from different markets and wide variety of actual clients. It’s possible. But the odds are less in your favour when you don’t take a risk. When you hedge your bets. We wanted to award work we felt inspired and propelled the quality of work people in the industry think is possible to make and be successful.
So take a risk, and when you do win, be immensely proud.
Celebrate.
Because a lot more lose.
I want to thank Barbara Levy and her team who really looked after all the jurors this week. LIA is a great show, and I met a lot of great people. I look forward to hopefully returning one day.
(The Grand LIA Production & Post-Production Winner – Telstra ‘Better on a Better Network’ via Revolver)