Before You Hire Me
Here is exactly how I work.
Halloran Hardware is a third-generation hardware store in a small Ohio town. It does not exist. Neither does Dale, who owns it, or Marisol, who is being handed it.
Everything below is the real sequence a paid engagement runs. The company and the people are invented, because putting a real employee's assessment on a public page is not mine to do. In a real engagement every name here is replaced by someone who actually works at your organization, and every guess is replaced by what they said on the record.
Before anyone is cast or filmed, we agree on the five words this film has to earn. Not a tagline. A test. Every frame either serves one of the five or it comes out.
I interview candidates and write a brief on each one. Scored, evidenced, with a recommendation. You see the reasoning, including for the person I did not pick.
Six points carry the film. Each one storyboarded, wrapped in the specific place it happens. Built last, and the first thing that looks like a film.
Stage One · The Questions
They go to a group, not a person. The answers rarely agree with each other, and the disagreement is the most useful part.
What does this business do that a customer would notice if it stopped tomorrow?
Who here knows something that would be lost if they left, and has never been asked to write it down?
What is the thing people outside this company consistently get wrong about it?
Describe a time this company was tested and did not take the easy way. Name the people who were there.
Tell me about a moment you tried to explain this place to someone and it did not land. What did you say, and what did they say back?
If this film works exactly as intended, what changes for you?
Stage One · The Five Words
Drawn out of the answers, not decided in advance. Once you approve them they become the cutting rule. Anything that serves none of the five is out, however good it looks.
The business exists because things break. Every scene has something in it that is broken, being fixed, or holding together longer than it should.
Not stated by anyone on camera. Demonstrated by what customers hand over without asking the price first.
The film has a clock. Somebody is being given something. It governs the pacing more than the imagery.
Proximity as an argument. This place is ten minutes closer and forty years older than the alternative, and one of those matters more.
Nothing here is inherited cleanly. The successor is not family. It keeps sentiment out of the edit.
Stage Two · The People
Forty-one. At Halloran since 2004. Assessed from one seventy minute interview.
| Measure | Evidence from the interview | |
|---|---|---|
| What she wants | To be handed a business that is not hers by blood, and to not be the one who loses it. Specific, urgent, said without being asked. | 5 / 5 |
| Why she wants it | Her first job at nineteen. She names four customers she has known longer than she has known her husband. | 4 / 5 |
| What makes her unlike anyone else | A third-generation store handing off outside the family. She is the exception the whole premise turns on. | 5 / 5 |
| Strength | 14 / 15 | |
| Relevance to the five words | 4 / 5 | |
| Total | 18 / 20 |
The owner is the obvious choice and the wrong one. Dale has the history, but he has already arrived, and a film built on him is a retrospective. Marisol has not arrived yet, which means the audience finds out alongside her and leaves having felt something change. Dale is still in the film. He fills the gaps she cannot.
Open and risky: she has never been filmed and got quieter when the recorder went on. Two hours of nothing in particular before the real interview, or this score does not survive contact with a camera.
Stage Three · The Shape
Same six every time, in this order. What changes is what fills them. Each one is wrapped in a specific place, because a point that happens nowhere does not land.
The opening that pulls, without giving away the ending
A hand-lettered sign in the window: closing early Thursday, family thing. Nobody says what the family thing is.
She hits the thing in her way
The big box opens. Dale wants to talk about the handoff. She wants to talk about Tuesday.
The first real step
She takes the key to the back office. Small, physical, irreversible.
The key moments, however they land
One customer she keeps. One she loses to a price she cannot match. One night doing the ordering wrong and Dale not correcting her.
Win or lose, the curiosity closes
Thursday. The family thing. It is the handover, and the family in the room is not his.
The note they leave with
Somebody walks in for one screw and stays twenty minutes. Nothing has changed and everything has.
Stage Three · The Frames
One board per point. Camera, lens, movement and light called before the shoot day, so the day is execution instead of discovery. These are my hand frames, drawn to argue the composition.
What You Hold At The End
A film, and the reason every frame in it is there.
The five words your team approved. A brief on every person considered, including the ones passed over and why. Six points, each one argued. Six boards, each one shot-planned. And underneath all of it, the interviews, which are yours to keep and usually outlive the film.