Last Wednesday, Oct. 29, SPD hosted a Video in Publishing panel at the SVA Theater as part of their 50th Anniversary Speaker Series. The event gave viewers an exclusive, behind-the-scenes take into the world of publishing from some of the most talented people in the industry. Panelists included Photo Director of Esquire Mike Norseng, Executive Producer of Condé Nast Grant Jones, Video Producer of Vanity Fair Gilly Barnes and Photo Director of TIME Kira Pollack, who moderated the event. The panelists presented their own award-winning works with commentary, giving valuable insight into the evolution of video in magazines and how some of these brands have responded to video’s surging popularity.
The event kicked off with an introduction of moderator Kira Pollack—a fantastic director who, among her most notable achievements, won photo editor of the year at the Lucie Awards in 2011, spearheaded an Emmy award-winning “Beyond 9/11” project in 2012 and started up TIME’s new documentary filmmaking endeavor, Red Border Films, in 2013. The photo director of TIME since 2009, Pollack has witnessed first-hand how the publishing industry has changed over the years and how professionals in the business have adapted by expanding their skill-set. “One of the hardest things we all have to work on with these brands is how we distribute them and how we evolve our jobs,” she said. “As an editor, I started evolving with the photographers.”
Pollack went on to introduce panelist Mike Norseng, the photo director of Esquire who had a “fortunately accidental” experience that helped him land his dream job at the magazine. Fresh of out college, Norseng interviewed at GQ magazine to freelance in their photography department for two weeks—a gig that spiraled into working for GQ for four years. Esquire took notice, offered Norseng a job and just a few years later promoted him to photo director of the magazine.
“Right around the time I was promoted internally at Esquire, the industry was also shifting to more of an emphasis to extending stories on websites,” he said. “When I took over as photo director, one of the things that I wanted to do was more extended content utilizing the Esquire.com. I think the first issue when I took over…I had the photographer buy a couple rolls of 16mm film and after the still-shoot was done, do some intimate, seemingly home video of the actress walking along a beach. That was kind of when Esquire’s video efforts kicked off.”
Norseng showed some clips of Megan Fox, Mila Kunis and Clint Eastwood that Esquire produced and elaborated on the magazine’s thoughts about creating more complex video. “We kind of made the decision that if we were going to do video for the magazine…it had to have its own voice and it should be unique and it should feature not necessarily the production process, but the talent we were covering.”
Next up on the panel was Gilly Barnes, an Emmy award-winning commercial director who has worked for an array of big-name brands, including MTV, Nike and the U.S. State Department. Barnes presented three episodes from Vanity Fair’s ASME-nominated series Snob’s Dictionary, with each representing a category of rock, food, or film. It was obvious that an incredible amount of research went into these impressive two minute long clips, which we later discovered included rare footage sourced from around the world.
“Every film was weeks and weeks of research and chasing weird things,” Barnes recalled. She stressed how important it was to her to both represent the original writer’s vision and stay true to the magazine. “Getting the show together and getting on the same page with the writer was initially challenging because…[the writer] was very protective of the tone of his book series and so we had to work together to figure out how what I was going to do was going to bring that to the right kind of life,” she said.
Grant Jones, the executive producer of Condé Nast, was last to present. Unlike some of his fellow panelists, Jones followed a more traditional route in the film industry: he worked his way up the ladder. After holding a variety of jobs that ranged from music video editor to post-production supervisor to director, he was hired as executive producer of the Onion before being brought on by Condé Nast a couple of years later.
Jones and his team are credited with Glamour’s Emmy-award winning series Screw You Cancer—a docu-series about a young women deciding to undergo a preventative double mastectomy. It’s the first digital series ever to win an Academy Award. At the event, Jones showcased a clip that he felt was a great representation of the six-part series and afterwards introduced a surprise guest in the audience: the series’ protagonist, Caitlin Brodnick.
Jones went on to speak about the significance of the series, how his team came across Caitlin’s story and they how realized her vibrant personality would become one of the most defining aspects of the series itself. “We knew it was a topic that women were interested in. We knew it was an important topic to talk about,” he said. “When we got to know Caitlin, we also found this person who was incredibly funny, incredibly loving and it kind of morphed into not only a story of taking control of her circumstances, but also a love story…a love story between her and her husband.”
For more about SPD and upcoming events for their 50th Anniversary Speaker Series, visit their site.
Elizabeth Unger is a food and travel writer who lives in Brooklyn. Check out her blog.
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