Mastering Feedback – A Filmmaker’s Guide to Creative Collaboration

Nowadays, video production is often a one-man show. We all know filmmakers and content creators who work on their projects solo from start to finish. However, to me, filmmaking remains a collaborative process, and you cannot create something big and beautiful without involving others. Well, you probably can, but why would you? It’s the exchange with fellow artists that brings so much to the table! Between composers and sound designers, cinematographers and lighting magicians, directors and editors, and so on and so forth. Ideally, every specialist on your crew should be able to share their ideas. That’s when we come to the question of feedback: How to give it correctly, how to ask for it, how to work with it? Let’s tackle it from a filmmaker’s perspective!

Some of you might think this is a boring topic. Well, I disagree. Feedback is an essential part of every collaborative process. If you work with creatives, it also becomes a vulnerable one. Every art is subjective; there are no “goods” and “bads,” but we still need to create a film that transports a concrete and cohesive vision in the end. Therefore, we need to know both how to communicate our ideas to the team and how to work with feedback given to us.

Giving sandwich feedback

I bet everyone knows the term “sandwich” feedback – you hear it in all areas of our work and life so frequently that it has become a cliché. However, there is a reason why this particular type of feedback remains the most widespread.

But first, a short reminder of how it works. The sandwich feedback method, as the name suggests, is criticism nestled between layers of positive feedback. You start with something positive, then slide in some constructive notes on areas that don’t work yet and need tweaking, and finish with another slice of encouragement. It’s not about pretending, sugarcoating, or acting nice. No, it’s about making the tough stuff easier to digest and keeping the overall vibe supportive.

In a healthy team, every member tries to do their best. They usually do not want to jeopardize your project on purpose or produce something lousy just to make you feel bad. On the contrary, they also want to take pride in the final product. So, acknowledgement is super important – by being open, welcoming, and saying thank you.

Apart from that, always trying to find something good in the suggestions of others offers us a powerful insight. I’ve given a lot of feedback notes over the years – to actors, storytellers, cinematographers, production designers, sound specialists, editors, make-up artists (the list goes on), and I can tell you from my experience: Every (exclamation mark!) every idea has something positive and potentially interesting in it, no matter how out-of-place or strange it might seem at first.

Every idea has potential

Remember Gollum from the original “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy? Initially, the actor Andy Serkis was hired to voice the character only. Peter Jackson didn’t consider motion capture for him at the beginning. The company responsible for the movie’s visual effects, Weta Digital, was still trying to figure out the best approach to computer-generated Gollum at the time. However, Serkis wasn’t just a voice actor, and even during the audition, he began physically acting out the role. Seeing his craft, the production team and the director asked him to act on set as well, so that Elijah Wood and Sean Austin, who portrayed Frodo and Sam, wouldn’t need to interact with a tennis ball on a stick.

We all know how the story ends. Weta Digital ended up re-recording all of Serkis’s scenes in a motion capture suit on a Volume and incorporating his full-body performance into Gollum’s animation. So, the actor’s desire to go beyond what was expected of him not only created one of the legendary characters on screen but also pushed forward the technology that is widely used nowadays. Imagine if he had stuck to voicing the character only! Or that Peter Jackson would have been reluctant to the ideas of others. How differently would this story of a successful franchise go?

When something doesn’t work

Another moment when it’s important to be fully open to the feedback and ideas of others is when something isn’t working as planned. Every problem has multiple solutions, but it’s hard to notice them when you’re still caught inside the frame of the first choice.

Let me give you an example. On “Jaws,” Steven Spielberg initially planned to show the shark much more often throughout the film. The main issue was that the mechanical fish, called “Bruce,” kept malfunctioning in the saltwater. That increased the effort and the amount of time spent on set drastically.

According to some interviews, it was the renowned editor Verna Fields who kept saying they shouldn’t show the shark at all, but let the audience imagine it. Naturally, Spielberg wasn’t happy with this suggestion:

All of our disagreements happened with that darn shark! Verna was always in favor of less to be more. And I was trying to squeeze in that one more–because it took me DAYS to get that one shot! So I’m going back to, I’m on a barge for two days trying to get the shark to look real, and the sad fact was that the shark would only look real in 36 frames and not 38 frames. And that 2 frame difference was the difference between something really scary, and something that looked like a great white floating turd.

A quote by Steven Spielberg

Was it good fortune that the shark kept breaking? Or the gut feeling of the amazing editor? Or both? In any case, ultimately, this decision added much more suspense to the film, making it a classic masterpiece.

Turning negative feedback into productive tips

If you need a subtle way to get rid of a scene in the script or a shot that is very dear to your cinematographer, or any other element that someone else from the team likes, Mark Travis offers the following approach in his book “The Film Director’s Bag of Tricks.” He calls it “microsurgery.” Imagine you’re a director working with a writer, and you need to give them feedback on a character who has to be removed from the next screenplay version:

• Step 1. Praise. Again, just like in the “sandwich” method, you need to spread Novocaine on the area where the incision is about to be made. Be honest and genuine. Find something truly positive about this character and talk about it first. Maybe it’s a powerful, independent, and engaging woman. “Too bad she isn’t a protagonist – she really deserves her own story.”
• Step 2. Even more praise.
• Step 3. The invitation. Silence – allow your writer to think about what you’ve just said. Maybe they’ll feel the urge to fill the silence and offer their insights on this character. In that case, listen carefully.
• Step 4. The kill. Suggest removing the character from the story altogether, so that she doesn’t draw all the attention to her and the writer doesn’t need to do damage to her or other characters.
• Step 5. The salve. End on a positive note. For example, ask the writer to hold on to this character because she is phenomenal, and you want them to save her for later stories.

Director and editor’s collaboration

Feedback is important. But knowing when to ask for it and when not to might matter even more.

Renowned editor Tom Cross talks in his MZed course “The Art & Technique of Film Editing” about his ongoing collaboration with the director Damien Chazelle. He says that some directors like to provide feedback on the first rough cut, while others don’t. For Damien, for instance, this is too painful. Tom remembers how they watched “La La Land” together in the editing room when the film was in a very early phase. Damien sat in silence, and then turned to him and asked: “Do you think we have a movie?”

According to Tom Cross, if something is too painful, it does more damage than good. You should develop trust in every collaboration and always remember to be constructive. Don’t spend too much time dwelling on negative things. In other words, if you’re an editor, don’t force your director to look at things when they don’t want to look at these particular things. Of course, you might feel you already need the feedback. But ask yourself first: Will it be a productive discussion, or not? Will it bring us further? Should I maybe work a little bit more on my version before I ask for the notes and ideas of others?

There is always something in the feedback

Also, obviously, not every piece of feedback needs to be implemented. It is important, though, to listen to it and evaluate it. Would the suggested changes help me tell the story? Why did people make these notes in the first place?

In his book “Novelist as a Vocation,” the famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami shares an interesting insight gained from giving a draft to beta readers. In his experience, people often note a specific scene or place in the story and suggest a different solution. Oftentimes, their suggestions are cumbersome, weird, and would never work. However, he carefully observes all the comments and rewrites every scene beta readers have found fault with, even when he disagrees.

It seems that when a reader has a problem, there is usually something that needs fixing, whether or not it corresponds to their suggestions. In short, the flow of their reading has been blocked. It is my job, then, to eliminate that blockage, to unclog the pipe, as it were. How to do that is up to me, the author.

A quote from the book

How to ask for feedback

While I fully agree with Haruki Murakami, I would like to add a small point. What also helps is to ask for the feedback specifically. Don’t just send your film link and wait for a response. Give your viewers some guidance on what feedback would be particularly useful to you. I often send questions that allow me to evaluate how the storytelling works. The basic ones I use are:

• What is this film about, to you?
• What emotions did you have at the end?
• What scene or moment impressed you most and will stay in your memory for a long time?
• Were there places in film where you felt at a loss and didn’t understand something (what’s going on, why the characters do something, or the context, for example)?
• Were there moments when the film felt too slow-paced and dragging, or, on the contrary, too fast and chaotic?
• What is the main message of this story, in your opinion?

Feel free to use and modify these however you like.

Test screenings for gathering feedback

In the cinema world, we don’t have beta readers. However, we do have test screenings, and they are an important tool in a filmmaker’s kit, particularly because they provide helpful feedback that you can actually work with further. (Although it is kind of difficult when the film is already finished and screening at cinemas around the world…)

That’s why, whenever you work on something, I highly recommend organizing a test screening for family and friends and preparing a questionnaire. Even if viewers don’t answer the questions, it’s still a very different feeling to watch your film with other people around. You can observe reactions and note when they laugh, when they hold their breath, and when they reach for their smartphones.

Answers, in turn, help to make small but important tweaks. Director Zach Braff said once on the “Team Deakins” podcast that in “A Good Person,” the love story wasn’t important to him, so he didn’t focus on it in the final scenes. Yet the test viewers were bothered and wanted to know whether the relationship stood a chance or not. So in the next edit, Zach added a small off-screen dialogue line, which clarified a lot and satisfied the worried audience. To him, making the change wasn’t difficult or significant, but the viewers could now concentrate on more important matters, like the film’s message, and not feel stressed about something else.

What about you?

What kind of feedback do you prefer to give or receive? Are there any other tips you’d like to share? How did you like this article? Give me your feedback in the comments, but please, use the “sandwich” method. You know, I’m also a creator, and we do enjoy positive notes!

Full disclosure: MZed is owned by CineD.

Feature image: film stills from “The Lord of the Rings” by Peter Jackson, 2001; “Jaws” by Steven Spielberg, 1975; “A Good Person” by Zach Braff, 2023.

Additional sources:

• “The Film Director’s Bag of Tricks: How to Get What You Want from Actors and Writers” by Mark W. Travis, 2011;
• “Novelist as a Vocation” by Haruki Murakami, 2015.