Ep.65 Work-Life balance for documentary filmmakers

Navigating a work-life balance when making a documentary is a tricky task! And one that Sue has become very accustomed to.  To make it work, you need to learn how to make it work for you! 

How do you balance having a family? Or having holidays? Or stop yourself from completely burning out? (All valid questions!)

So today, Sue is going to break down how she manages this exciting but crazy lifestyle.

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Transcript

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Hello everyone! Today I am talking all about the elusive work-life balance. And I think this is particularly important for filmmakers, especially filmmakers who are just getting started or you might even be mid-career, but understanding that difference between work-life balance, how to make it all work, and still have a rewarding career. Look, it's it's pretty tough going, I've got to say. And it's interesting because this is a topic that comes up over and over and over again. People are always talking about work-life balance. So my question to you today is is it even possible? Now, why am I talking to you about this? Well, I am Sue Collins. I am the host of the Moonshine Moonshot Podcast, what you're listening to right now. And this is episode 65. I can't believe we're so far into the series already. And it's probably quite timely to come to this particular topic because I know many of you, when you're just starting out a new career, are probably not parents. However, for myself, I am well and truly a parent of two young children. And so I've had to transition my career from being single to being married and then running a business with my partner, the Moonshine Agency. And we also manage family and travel and everything that goes with documentary filmmaking and running a business. So work-life balance is definitely something that I have had to grapple with a lot. Now, if you're not familiar with Moonshine Agency, it's an impact film production house and we produce films with purpose. And the majority of our films are documentary, and we have quite a lot going on at the moment because we're releasing a new documentary. We also share a lot of how we get things done through this podcast, The Moonshine Moonshot, and also on the Moonshine Communications Academy YouTube channel, you can find tons and tons of videos about you know everything to do with how to make documentary. And at the moment, we've been working our way through everything from ideation to development to pre-production and production, and we're almost up to the point where we're starting to talk about post-production. So check out all of that if you're wanting to learn a lot more. But today I'm talking to you about work-life balance. Now, balance in life, it sounds so fabulous and yet so elusive. If anyone who's ever strived for work-life balance or felt pressure to have it knows the feeling that seeking it can bring up, the questions start to roll. If other people are searching for it, then it must be possible to have balance, right? People always talk about having it. If other people can seemingly find it, surely I can too. But it's not easy to find, and it is definitely not easy to keep a hold of. So why is that? Well, let me put it to you in a big bold statement. I think work life balance is a load of crap. There's really just no such thing. So let's get real about this concept. It's something that I have thought about a lot, and it's been under my skin ever since I became a mother, and the pressure to obtain work-life balance really kicked in. So the literal definition of balance is an even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to maintain upright and steady. Equilibrium. If you really are striving for a state of equilibrium, look, it sounds so fancy and outlandish. It probably actually sounds like a pretty good film title. Probably is a film title. But to be honest, I had to Google Equipose, which is another one. Uh, when equilibrium comes up, you always find equipose. And its meaning is balance of forces and interests. Now, this definition of balance makes sense. And of course, we want to have balance, but remaining upright and steady, how does that apply in the real world? I'm gonna try and break it down because if you don't know what balance is, then how do you know what you're striving for? So when you think about this elusive work-life balance thing, do you imagine your day, your calendar, your life in some kind of harmonious blur of light and love where you float along each day with an innate ability to handle any and everything? Because you have all the portions of your day perfectly in balance. Or is it just kind of a sense that things are all falling into place and you have time for all the various parts of your life, your family, your partner, your work, health, fitness, diet, learning, friends, and so on and so on, and you feel content and fulfilled. Or you have absolutely no idea. Truthfully, you have not thought about the practical application of work-life balance, and it just sounds like such a great thing to have. Or possibly, work-life balance is the state of equilibrium where a person's equally prioritizing the demands of their career and the demands of their personal life. Well, I have to say that really none of those sounds particularly obtainable to me, at least not in the long-term sustained way. So the answer, the fourth one I mentioned, D, by the way, is the definition of work-life balance from a blog on the Business News Daily. And the article goes on to explain that work-life balance will improve physical, emotional, and mental well-being, and it is important for your career. So I think, particularly if you're a filmmaker, it is worth paying a little bit more attention to what work-life balance is for you and what does it mean for you? And I think this is the thing that really trips us all up when we think about work-life balance, because what's a good balance for me as a filmmaker at the stage of career I'm at, where I have my family, is going to be really different for someone who's starting out their career and has a whole lot of different priorities and commitments. So whether you agree with any of the four statements that I made or not, you do need to think about how it relates to you and your filmmaking. I think one thing we can probably all agree on is that having your life in a manageable state that doesn't leave you stressed, exhausted, unhappy, and feeling completely overwhelmed is certainly something to strive for. But what I'm suggesting is that the pressure that we put on ourselves to have it all figured out is part of what's causing a lot of that stress, exhausted, and unhappy feeling to begin with. Because when we don't have it all figured out, we feel, well, completely out of balance. And then we feel pressure to have it figured out, and then we feel like we should have it figured out, and on and on it goes. So I'm not sure you can ever truly have work-life balance. Work rest and play is an interesting concept. So let's put aside the idea of consistent work-life balance, that it's let's put aside the idea that that's even obtainable, and just accept for the sake of argument that trying to get there will only make us feel hopeless, inadequate, or at the least just completely unorganized. So instead of thinking about making all the different parts of our lives balanced or as the definition states, evenly distributed, why don't we try to figure out how to de-stress, unclutter, and rethink how we're managing things that may reduce all those feelings of being out of balance. And the work-life balance is not a modern or contemporary thing to want. And I know my grandfather fought really hard for the right for an evenly distributed day of eight hours work, eight hours rest, and eight hours play. And that was over 70 years ago. And prior to the legislation being approved in 1948 in Australia, Australian workers who demanded this had been exploited for generations with no boundaries or restrictions on time at work versus time at home. But in our current society, when it comes to balance, let me put it this way: is everything equally important? Because then nothing is actually important. So assuming everything has the same level of priority and life simply can't work that way. You're just spreading yourself really thin, especially if you have a young family. I hear so many working mothers longing for balance, wanting to have time to themselves only to feel terrible and guilty when they get it, or just feeling guilty simply because they want it. So I'm gonna get back to the filmmaking and how all of this relates to you as a filmmaker. And I think this is where you've got to really adapt your filmmaking to your lifestyle. So, as I mentioned before, kids. I have kids, and when I became a mother, my lifestyle changed a lot. Did it stop me making films? Absolutely not. I just travelled with the kids, you know. I was jumping on a plane when my firstborn son was six weeks old. I was traveling up to Sydney to do shoots and taking him with me. And you know, you just make it work. It's not easy. I am not pretending that that is easy, but you can do it, you can make it work. So never let having a family be a stopping force in your filmmaking. That's my first piece of advice. Then the other part about this, let's put kids aside because many of you may not have families at this point. But when it comes to filmmaking, often if you're a documentary filmmaker, it's going to involve a lot of travel. One way you can adapt filmmaking to your lifestyle is, particularly if you enjoy travel, is that when you travel to locations for your filmmaking, don't just blast in, get the job done, and blast out again. If you have the budget and the time, stay and see the place. Get to know the people that you're working with better, stay a day longer and make the most of the experience. Look, it's not always possible, but you know, if you're traveling, you know, halfway across the world, don't just smash everything into five days and get out of there again. It may be a budget reason, but if you can just get that extra day, it's going to be great for your mental health as well as, you know, just experiencing the world. And also it can really help with fatigue because when you're traveling for filmmaking, it is extremely tiring. And I'm still recovering from a four-week trip that I've been speaking about in the last few podcasts, where um myself and the team traveled to the USA for four weeks, and it was exhausting. And when we came back, I mean it was an amazing trip, but it was exhausting. And when we came back, we're also in the middle of releasing a brand new documentary, which is going out in cinemas right across Australia. So you can imagine how busy it is. There was no time to recover from jet lag. We literally landed on a Sunday morning, had the rest of Sunday to, you know, just unpack and relax. And then bang, Monday morning, 9 a.m., we were back in the office, full-scale promotion on this new documentary. It's extremely fatiguing. I am still tired and I don't recommend working this way. As I said, sometimes you can't avoid it. The priority is that, you know, we had to do that. And you know, this week I'm off to New Zealand to shoot for another project and then come back the following week and the film launches. The team are working double time, it's not ideal, but then at the end of it all, we'll have some downtime and everyone will get an opportunity to catch up. So again, adapting, moving, making things work for your lifestyle, making things work for your filmmaking, understanding that sometimes things are going to be incredibly busy and other times things aren't. So finding the balance between really busy and less busy is actually more important than trying to have some kind of consistent balance. Some practical things about traveling when you're filmmaking that I should mention. It is such a unique experience when you are a documentary filmmaker and you get to travel to other countries and you get to be invited into people's homes to film with them for a day, two days, sometimes longer. You get to really experience their lifestyle, their homes, you get to know them, you get a really unique insight into the world people live in in different countries, and it is so rewarding. So, you know, give yourself that time and space to really immerse in it, really engage and get the most out of those experiences because people are giving you their time and their stories, and you should make the most of that opportunity and really give them the best of yourself as well. So if you're really tired and stressed and jet lagged, you're not going to be your best filmmaking self. So the next bit of advice is as I said before, give yourself buffer for jet lag, for travel delays, for luggage hiccups, all of those things. Try and pace yourself when you're traveling as best you can. And if you can just make that budget stretch for a little bit longer for an extra day, it is going to work in your favor. The other part about work balance for filmmakers, particularly when your early career or if you're transitioning into full-time filmmaking, or perhaps you work for a production company and you want to run your own show. You're you there's all these different transition stages in filmmaking depending on where you're at. So you might have a day job that's actually got nothing to do with filmmaking, and you might be working on your film on the weekend. You know, that's really cool. That's good. Do that. That is making filmmaking work for your lifestyle. You've got to work nine to five to pay your bills, but then you have all that time on your commute to get to work, you have all that time in the evening, you have your weekends. You can put your filmmaking into those times until you're in a position where your filmmaking can become your full-time gig and you can let go of whatever that other commitment you have for earning money is. Because filmmaking can be a lucrative career, it can sustain you. You've just got to transition into it in a sensible way that you don't get yourself into debt. And that's probably a whole different topic, but it is a balance. So that's another part of the work-life balance for filmmaking. It's making sure your filmmaking works with your lifestyle and the commitments that you have. It's a lot of tenacity, you guys. Filmmaking is tenacity. There's no rules. You got to set your own rules. When when you are running your own show, you you do it your own way. You prioritize things in a way that gives you the best results and the best opportunity to create the best films that you can. And you just move things around. Try something. If it works, great. If it doesn't, ditch it. There's just no right and wrongs when it comes to work-life balance. And I think I think the thing to remember is that you're not striving for a work-life balance like they're two different things work versus life. I think that's also a big part of this issue. Work and life are not different things, they are all your life. It's how you're choosing to spend your time. So embrace it. Find ways that, you know, make it less um, less difficult for yourself. Do things that make it easy on yourself. Enjoy it. Enjoy the process. And filmmaking is a really fantastic career. So I highly encourage you to find ways to make filmmaking fit your lifestyle. Anyway, I hope I hope that big rant I just went on then was actually useful to you all. It's a bit of a different episode this one. And I will be back next week with more on production for documentaries. So hit subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on, and I will speak to you again next week.