Coda: creative filmmakers running a lean business
Keep the ideas flowing and the admin to a minimum
We recently caught up with Lawrence and Callum of CODA Filmworks to hear more about their creative practice and the agility they’ve built into their creative operations and production.
CODA is a full-service video agency working with mostly lifestyle and sport brands but in their own words they’re not a traditional agency and try their best to integrate deeply into the teams they’re working with; less of a project-oriented way and more of a ‘it would be cool to figure this out’ sort of way. They run a nimble and agile ship; with just the three founders full-time, with a selective gang of creatives who they draft in on the regular.
How CODA came to life
CODA came about as a result of Lawrence, Callum and Chris, the three founders having the same roots in filmmaking, being on roughly the same creative journeys at the exact same time. They kept running into each other and knew of each others’ work. Lawrence says: ‘in many ways we’re all cut from the same cloth, being the weird kids at school who loved cameras and stories… our first actual project working together was a gruelling 18-hour shoot for Gymshark; an extreme triathlon up in the Scottish highlands… a proper baptism of fire, but we did a really good job.’
Prior to CODA, they were working with a string of travel content creators, who would be flown around the world for various projects, so they all crossed paths in that context a few times before CODA was founded.
Lawrence handles production; with Chris on direction and Callum on cinematography. ‘We’ve hit a bit of a home run with how we function and how we operate the business,’ Lawrence says, and working with brands like Salomon, Mercedes and Under Armour — to name a few — suggests the very lean model they run really is a winning formula. ‘If you grow too quickly, and you get a fancy office and you get 10 employees, all of a sudden, you can’t be super picky with the work that you choose… we really don’t want to end up in that scenario’, Callum adds as the guys reflect on the desire to stay lean for as long as they can.
A sharp focus
The guys talk a little about their creative process, they’d just got a new big whiteboard in their studio and explain how it’s already been helping them be more rigorous around their ideation process. ‘There’ll be a million different ideas and references swirling around sometimes… the key has been to stay focused on those things that get the project moving to the next stage,’ Lawrence says.
There’s a flow to creative processes and taking ideas from their conceptual referential state to their ultimate final form, and something the guys note is the running of their business that can sometimes snap them out of the flow… something like — in Lawrence’s words: ‘an email from the bookkeeper about some 7000-odd receipts that we need to find… that sort of thing takes hours out of the day and isn’t fun at all; it drags us out the headspace we want to spend more time in… the creative thinking.’ So, it makes sense that Lawrence loves to send bills/receipts via Whatsapp with Apron; he says: ‘it makes all those moments take up less time and less headspace that is helpful to all of us… we just want to be making great video work for our clients.’
Tools that keep the wheels turning
‘These tools we’ve started using really are streamlining so many of our day-to-day things, obviously we’ve got Apron for the finance stuff, and we all love using Milanote for collating references, but when it comes to pre-production it’s also there, keeping things focused, in one place.’ Lawrence says.
CODA works because the founders are hellbent on staying in the creative work, so finding solutions to allow them to do so, whether that's new software, the whiteboard (of course) and a nice coffee machine to boot. Streamlining receipts and payment capture through Apron, keeps admin friction low, so Lawrence and the team’s attention stays where it should: on client briefs, creative ideas, and winning new business.
What’s next for CODA is even more wicked, creative work and ‘getting more money on the screen for our clients,’ says Callum.
