Content Producer (Video) - First Hire, Content Division

Location: Brooklyn, NY (studio, on location, and client sites)

Status: Full-time independent contractor

Salary: $65,000 - $75,000 a year, paid monthly, which our accountant will explain to you with a patience none of us deserve

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For almost ten years now we have run a creative agency in Brooklyn, and in that time we have learned to do a great many things: build brands, campagins, web stuff, digital and physical products, the particular smile you give a client's CFO when he says the word "budget." What we are building next is a content division. A proper one, with editors and DoPs and a colorist who cares about skin tones. Every division has to start with somebody, and this posting is for the somebody.

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Being first in means the division is, for a while, you. You'll shoot, you'll cut, you'll grade, you'll storyboard on whatever surface is nearest. But the point of being first is not to do everything forever. The point is that the team gets built around you, and in our experience you cannot hire a great editor, or direct a DoP, or brief a colorist, unless you've done enough of each job yourself to know what good looks like and roughly what it costs. Nobody has ever successfully delegated a thing they didn't understand. They've only ever paid for it.

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So we're looking for range rather than mastery of everything. Deep enough in the craft to make excellent work with your own hands now, fluent enough across the rest to grow into the person who runs the room later. If you're a shooter who can cut, or an editor who can light, and you've been quietly suspecting you're meant to lead something, that suspicion is what we're hiring.

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Most weeks, the work is social content: clips, series, the short and quick and platform-shaped. A few times a year a bigger brief arrives, a real campaign with locations and talent and a schedule, and on those days you'll bring in the crew you need and run the day. Knowing which parts to hand off, and to whom, is the first act of building the team. It starts with a gaffer's phone number and ends, if all goes well, with a department.

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We work with beverage brands, aviation, venture funds, stock exchanges, music tech companies, record labels, banks and hotels, which sounds glamorous until you are lighting a conference room at eight in the morning, and then it is merely work, which is fine. Work, and a division with your fingerprints on it. That is what we're offering.

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What We Would Like From You

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• Three or more years of shooting and editing professionally, with a reel that proves it. And here we must be blunt: we will ask what, specifically, you did on every piece. Standing near a camera while someone else operated it does not count, no matter how supportively you stood.
• Working fluency across the pipeline: cameras, lighting, location audio, Premiere or whatever you cut on, and a grade that shows restraint. Restraint is the thing. Anyone can make footage teal.
• The ability to storyboard, meaning you can take an idea and turn it into a list of shots before anyone has moved a single C-stand.
• A system. Ingest, file names, versions, delivery specs. The workflows you set up in month one become the division's workflows, so they had better be ones you're proud of. We have met brilliant editors whose hard drives look like the aftermath of a burglary, and we have promised ourselves never again.
• You love to live in Davinci resolve or premiere pro
• The instinct to know when a shoot needs more than you, and ideally a few names already in your phone.
• Residence in NYC, or near enough that two shoot days a week doesn't require a ferry.

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On Equipment

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We own camera and lighting gear, which you may use. If you own your own and prefer it, wonderful. Want to rent stuff for shoots, we got you. People who own their tools tend to treat everyone's tools better, the way a man with his own knives never leaves someone else's in the sink.

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How to Apply

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Send your reel and three pieces you shot and edited entirely yourself to info@azaistudios.com, along with a sentence or two about the biggest production you've ever run and what went wrong on it. Something always goes wrong. The applicants who claim otherwise are the ones we worry about.

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Subject line: FIRST LAST - Content Producer Role

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Azai Studios is an equal opportunity organization. We care what you can make, and very little about anything else.