M+E Connections

Networking can play a key role in overcoming the many challenges and obstacles that women face in their careers in Hollywood and beyond – even during a COVID-19 pandemic, according to speakers at the SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit, presented by Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH).

“One of the double-edged swords for all employees – this is not just females – [is] if you’re really good at what you do, people like you in that job, and they keep thinking of you in that job and they don’t think of you broader,” Wendy Aylsworth, CEO of Walden Pond, said Oct. 7 during the Summit’s Mentoring & Networking track breakout session “The Ripple Effect: Choosing Technology as a Career Path.”

That’s why “you need to be interfacing with as many people as possible,” she told viewers during the session, which gathered the principal technologists and creatives behind the Entertainment Technology Center @ the University of Southern California’s latest innovation project, “Ripple Effect,” an R&D short film testing virtual and remote production.

In addition to discussing how that project has been used to overcome challenges created by the pandemic and the accompanying shift to remote work, they discussed challenges they have overcome on their career paths as technologists.

“Your career path is not always up. Oftentimes it’s sideways and sometimes down in order to move up,” according to Aylsworth, who added she was “probably mid-career before I really started getting involved in more of the industry associations and getting those connections outside of your normal work paths.”

Joining industry associations like WiTH and MESA helps let people know what your skillsets are, she pointed out, urging viewers to maintain their networks. If you participate in groups like this and participate in panels like this, people can see what your skillsets are, and “they’ll start thinking of you more – they’ll start calling on you to do more stuff,” she added.

Having good mentors from the start of one’s career also helps to overcome challenges, she said, noting she’s happy to have “lots of time” now to mentor those at the beginnings of their careers.

She recalled the time she spent earlier in her career as an engineer at Honeywell, where she loved working, but noted that “one of the negative things there” was a program it had in which executives were assigned to be mentors and she got stuck with a grumpy old guy as her mentor.

Five minutes into their first meeting, she recalled that he told her: “They’ve told me I’m your mentor.” “And I thought, ‘oh, shit.’”

Noting that “we have lots of mentors that come to our lives if we seek them out,” she recalled that one important mentor early in her career told her: “In order to not get pigeonholed in your job, make sure that you’re not just doing what your boss wants to do. Make sure that you’re working for the objectives of your boss’s boss and make sure that you’re getting out and reaching your peers and people outside your boss’s realm. Make sure you’re going out to lunch. Make sure you’re joining organizations like MESA – and not just joining, but also participating and meeting people and showing your skills outside of your regular little workspace. And that was invaluable.”

Kathryn Brillhart

“Your career is an evolving thing,” according to Kathryn Brillhart, a cinematographer and director who served as executive producer and director of virtual production on “Ripple Effect.”

“I can definitely say there have been a couple of lightbulb moments that have helped me put two and two together, and kind of make the next step” in her career, she told viewers. Her career has been a “series of stepping stones that I just sort of openly gravitate toward,” she said, adding: “Ten years ago I would never tell myself that I’d be doing this specific thing. But when I look back, it all makes sense – how everything sort of added up.”

One of her “lightbulb moments as a freelancer” a few years ago was realizing “Wow, why is it so easy for all of these guys that I started out on an equal playing field with in college — like they’re just helping each other out. They’re getting each other jobs.” Meanwhile, she was often either somebody’s date or not taken seriously or viewed as somebody who couldn’t operate a heavy camera for 12 hours, so she had to prove herself in other ways to stand out, she recalled.
There was a movement at the same time, about 6-7 years ago, when a network of women were having the same thoughts she was, and she started getting involved with networking with women in the industry, she recalled, adding: “It helped me battle some of my own biases against working with women.”
Her suggestion: “Lean into those groups and pull other women into your teams and the more you strengthen those networks around you, the further you’re going to go and the stronger that you’re going to feel along the way.”

On top of all that, “when you’re freelancing, you don’t have anybody protecting whether you have healthcare or all these necessary components for you to be successful, and when you’re just starting out, a union is like a catch-22,” she said.

Another suggestion: “Think really smart about the steps that you’re taking in your career. Make sure that your health comes first, that your security comes first, that you have real contracts in place, that you’re getting credit for your work,” she said.

Discussing her work on “Ripple Effect,” she noted that one major challenge that video content creators faced as they tried to return to production after the March lockdown was how many people they could have on set at any one time.

Directing remotely has become a possibility, she noted, adding we can also remotely capture the performance of a person. “There’s so many interesting opportunities right now,” she said.
What is helping is that there are “all these relatively consumer-priced tools that are being implemented in the visualization process right now, [and] it really opens up how you can approach doing experimental, creative work,” she added.

Brooke Noska

“In college, I thought I was going to be a PA that got coffee for the next 10 years,” recalled Brooke Noska, VFX producer and co-VFX supervisor of the Fox TV show “The Orville,” who worked on “Ripple Effect” also. And, not understanding how the industry worked, she thought maybe somebody would suddenly welcome her to the writer’s room, she said with a laugh.

Somebody once came to her class and showed how a green screen worked, and she thought “this is such a waste of time … that’s not why I’m going to school. And here I am. I am more intimate with a green screen than probably my roommates and colleagues,” she said.

Much of how successful one is in her or his career comes down to “what steps you make in the process and who you meet in the process,” she said, adding that, in her case, there were “a lot of lightbulbs involved.”

Discussing her work on “Ripple Effect,” she noted it was encouraging to see everybody working together to move the industry along and “there was a ton of really cool technology that came out of it” also.
But it wasn’t like the folks working on the project created an Apple computer in coming up with a system to work effectively and safely during the pandemic, she noted.

After all, what they’ve been using “are all technologies that are already established within our business,” she said. It’s all just being used in new ways for safety and other applications, she explained, such as using apps that will buzz if you get too close to somebody else. These technologies are now being used in ways “to get us moving forward,” she added.

One major positive that has come out of this is that it’s become clear that now anybody can be part of your production team – not just whoever is in Los Angeles, she went on to point out. For example, now you can tell the best person in Germany that she or he can be on a production in Los Angeles, she said, adding this is just “another open door to open up your network and your circle.”