Overnight Miracles- The Tale of Indie Content Production


    It is 7pm on Saturday night, I am clocked in to my bartending shift at the local Spanish tapas restaurant. I grab my phone from my pocket mostly to check the time. The first thing I see is a message from the makeup artist responsible for the looks for ALL four of the models for the photoshoot tomorrow. The message read:  “Hi! This is so horrible and last minute but the other location of the salon I work at in Virginia Beach needs me tomorrow for a situation and…”. My stomach dropped, she was bailing. For the next hour I float around my job, a physical embodiment of the confused mister krabs meme, texting every person that I know who does makeup to no avail. It’s all me.
    I get off at 2 am and begin organizing, cleaning, and sanitizing my pro makeup kit. Drying brushes until 5 in the morning. I rest my eyes for one hour before heading to CVS to pick up the rest of the makeup I need for the looks. When I get to the student media center I begin working on the makeup for all but one of the models, as she was able to do her own. Despite not having much practice in over a year miraculously, every look was executed well.


       
When it was all said and done we were only 30 minutes behind schedule. The rest of the shoot went off without a hitch. This story perfectly describes an “Overnight Miracle”, a phenomenon that every indie content producer has had to invoke at least once in their career. 
    Without the cushion of large crews, big budgets, or long lead times, indie creators improvise around unexpected hurdles. These hurdles can be anything from technical failures, shifting locations, uncooperative weather, to the sudden need to rethink an entire narrative or replace an important member of the project. Effectively performing this miracle is a uniquely resilient form of problem solving. One that combines problem solving at a Rubik’s cube level, determination, and a little bit of luck. Having to perform overnight miracles strengthens the indie content producers ability to work under pressure and is a defining advantage of the field.



  Although production models with large budgets occasionally require overnight miracles, indie productions require them rapid fire. Mastering constraint driven creativity sharpens their instincts and builds an adaptability that other models of productions often lack.
    Overnight miracle-workers transform obstacles into opportunities for originality that when it all comes together (and it always does) truly make a project one of one. I hope that every content producer no matter the scale has the opportunity to make this magic, but only as much is as absolutely necessary.