Bri Castellini

It's more valuable that you know how people answer their own questions without your input, since you won't always be in the room when audiences experience your work.

Both from my pent up decade of jealousy and my own recent increase in writer’s group activity, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about all the variables in creating your ideal creative collective.

You’re telling a fictionalized version of true events, and now comes the awkward part: how to tell the people who may recognize themselves in it.

If the film industry was a meritocracy based solely on effort, or finding a way to make something great with limited budgets, Hollywood would look very, very different. But it doesn’t.

But you need to be careful, set clear boundaries, and have an ironclad goal in mind for when to turn the tap off and send a bill.

As indie creators, we have neither the past notoriety, the platform, or the money to rely on classic marketing styles, so we have to get more creative.

If you cannot effectively or efficiently communicate, every part of the creative process will take twice as long and be ten times as frustrating as it needs to.

More than one thing can be true at once: you can deeply love and appreciate a piece of art, and deeply disagree with its creator or its impact.

When you take detailed notes on how episodes unfold, you notice the reason you like certain episodes more than others is that things don’t just happen for the sake of things happening.

Remember that your reel isn’t the full conversation—it’s the start of one.

Nailing your professional bio, and understanding that a single bio cannot rule them all, is an invaluable skill for every aspiring writer, filmmaker, director, and beyond.

Despite myself being an anxious asexual woman, I wasn’t a known entity in either of my other two segment communities yet. So, I started to do research.

Do I have key art chock-full of laurels? Sure. Do any of those laurels actually mean anything to anyone? Um … let’s move on.

With every industry starting to realize how meaningless geography is in determining talent, perhaps they’ll be useful even beyond the pandemic.

The decision to go to school for something isn’t as straightforward as “do you want a job?” anymore.