
Daniel Obzejta’s work spans many sides of the film industry, and he’s no stranger to collaboration. His clients include HBO, Netflix, USA, Yves Saint Laurent, and VICE, to name a few.
Five things you need to make a killer brand and/or music video? 1. A unique concept. 2. A crew of like-minds and able-hands. 3. Inertia. 4. Coffee. 5. Courage to completely change everything you set out to do. You have worked with some top entertainment companies. What would you say are key ingredients for collaborating and incorporating client feedback? Making sure everyone feels listened to. It’s important to put any form of ego aside and let the best idea on the table win, no matter who or where it comes from. This ensures that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. What’s the craziest piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten? “Can you make the cuts quicker. Like that Bieber video! Have you seen that Bieber video?” How critical is feedback to the post-production process? Staring at a screen in solitude for hours at a time can totally obliterate my objectivity. I have to let others take a look inside and share their thoughts.
How do review tools help with your workflow? I used review tools on the last music video I made “Up To You” for Jordan Lewis, and it ensured that the musician and I were in complete agreement after every cut. The video consists of an infinity zoom through a series of rooms, a trick I achieved by placing each shot on a separate layer in After Effects, keying out the green screen windows we constructed on set, and parenting the layers to each other as they scale up. This approach created a delicate house of cards — one small tweak in the top layer would create a cascade of changes (read: problems) down the subsequent 99 layers. So being absolutely clear with the musician about what changes we wanted to make was paramount. How has Vimeo impacted your work process? Vimeo is not only a clean and high-performance platform to organize and present my work, it’s also a vibrant and rich community to discover ideas and collaborators. Learn more about our collaboration tools, and see exactly what we’re offering for Video Review Month.