Hi All,

‘Tis sappy Nancy time once again, and I’m gonna ask that you bear with me here because I genuinely mean every last word I’m about to write.

Each of you has been, and continues to be, and does better, every single day. It’s shocking more often than I can put into context that the sum of our parts is still human.

End of the day, we are individuals doing our best to honor the hard work and stories of other individuals while supporting and championing those with whom we find ourselves in the trenches.

If you only knew the battles Team Dailies faces every night… the care and craftsmanship with which they’re tackling their 8.5 shows. The level of detail and fine tooth combing they do for everything hitting them at a pace of nearly 300 emails a night. They’re hand crafting looks on some of these shows, deal with more cameras and LUTs than most of us ever have to think about (hello, Hi-8) and doing it with the kind of care that makes me step back and really wonder how we got this lucky to have such a team, at such a time as this.

Cinecode was once just “DFT2” and this mysterious effort that Ramy would talk about as the future, but what had just been us evangelizing is now responsible for giant swaths of production budgets on headline shows like Ted Lasso, Our Flag Means Death, Waco, American Born Chinese (lead by Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton and his team), The Umbrella Academy, and so many more giant shows. We’ve added a Dev (Roger), an Editor (Zach), a Producer (Drew), and brought back our friend Kourosh on animation and scanning. This humble effort has burgeoned and grown so fast that it can be hard to catch a breath with all they navigate in a day.

The VFX Team is… how does one describe the essence of what sits between an immovable object and an unstoppable force? That’s them. The ever-growing, rapidly-evolving, magic-making arbiters of all that we hold dear in this business of bringing stories to life. And they do it all with this grace and patience and excellence of saints – if it weren’t so humbling and inspiring to keep up with, I’d find them obnoxious, but they really are this incredible team of bad asses who can make the best of everything.

Our heroes in Color… Whether it’s Thomas’ many hats, jumping from Restoration to holding down NLA (while CTO’ing the heck out of all us needy folks in and out of house), or Henry pivoting to Home Ec on dayside, or Shaley brining in a new show (Not Dead Yet) while wrapping a Herculean finale for Home Ec… this group has just slaughtered everything we’ve laid before them and continued to push us all forward with them.

The Online Department doubled overnight with the OG homies, Jake & Lakan, welcoming Jeremy and Samantha onboard with us for the long haul! And in conjunction with Scott who’s been nothing short of a miracle addition to our overall team, they’ve begun singing the songs of my heart with workflow documentation. All while Jake is training his butt off, Lakan is delivering Drop episodes, they’re both finishing shows, Scott’s putting out every workflow fire a show can come up with, and Jeremy is getting us across the last of the Amazon finish lines.

Engineering (my God, spend a couple hours with Greg and have your mind blown), Finance (want ever feel slower than molasses and only kind of financially savvy, hang out with Amy), Biz Dev, The Drop, Security, Facilities, Marketing, it goes on and on and on and ON.

There is so much that happens in this building or in your home offices in a day that my head spins and I fail more often at keeping up than I’d like to admit, but the feats are so many and the wins are so big that I just wanted to call out how very much each of you are seen and how grateful I am (and we are) to be doing any of this alongside of you.

It’s not always the work, the shows or the high fives, but it’s almost always the people. I look around at this team – from New York to LA, Vancouver to Virginia – we are so incredibly fortunate to have carved out such a space and a place in this industry where weird is rewarded and innovation is applauded. Y’all really are the best part of any day.

 
So thank you. Really. Thank you.