Rolling with the Murhpy’s [Law]

Philip Berber bringing some positive energy to the set holding the sound boom for my Film Crew

One of the things you learn very early on in production is to become good friends with Murphy because things are not going to go as planned – that’s what Murphy’s Law is all about. A key reason is that video and film production is very much about pre-production, planning and mapping out the day before you ever even break out the cameras (because filming is expensive). On the day of production you have a call sheet broken out in 15-minute intervals and then in minutes for the actual interview so you can get the shot and content you need. The kicker is when you film hi-profile entrepreneurs, they live and breath a roller coaster life and their schedules change constantly so chaos is the norm and you learn to embrace it and call Murphy a good friend or he will kick your tail. Murphy’s kicked my tail many times over the years, but I’ve learned to buddy up with him on a regular basis because he is quite the teacher as the following experience explains.

I was filming the last day of a 3-day production shoot of an Entrepreneur conference in Austin, TX called RISE that my company, CLUB E, partners with. We had to switch our second filming location of the day and some of our crew was late in arriving so it knocked us off schedule by about 90 minutes (that can be huge when you are planning by the minute). Plus, my DP had a hard-stop at 5:00pm that day which means he had to leave with all his equipment (lights, camera, mic’s, etc) at 5:30pm. We’d had 4 other big problems that day and I wasn’t keen on the shot/set-up my DP had picked either and the location was less than optimal, but we were pressed for time and we adjusted and got back into rhythm. Then one of entrepreneurs I had lined up to film that day was running late and it was going to impact the last person of the day that I was extremely exciting about filming because he such an inspiring story. After stressing for about 90 seconds (I timed it) and realizing there was little I could do about it, I gathered myself and started laughing at the day and smiling much more and decided instead to thank Murphy for being with is rather than keep cursing him.

Philip Berber & Ethiopia Film Crew

The person I was so eager to film was that engaging entrepreneur Philip Berber, founder of Cybercorpmurph (sold to Schwab for $477B) and A Glimmer of Hope. He has a great story in Cybercorp and especially in what Glimmer is trying to do (end world poverty), but I didn’t know much of his background coming from Ireland and pre-Cybercorp and stared out the interview asking him to tell us more. Here is what he said:

“Well there were two parts of growing up in Dublin Ireland that I Most remember. Oh I think it was an accident in some ways. The first one that comes to mind of sitting as little boy in the cinema in Dublin Ireland. Probably about ten or twelve and I’d remember two things dramatically. Yellow school buses. Sitting in Dublin Ireland looking at American movies and watching yellow school buses and the children. Second thing, it was the…the sun was always shining in America. And they had running tracks and all the girls were pretty and had short skirts. So I as an Irishman wanted to go to America as soon as I could.”

Philip Gerber working the water pump in Ethiopia

Now filming entrepreneurs for a living, I knew I had a ringer in front of me in terms of what he said, how he said it and his Rocking Irish accent. This was good stuff!! But, I was under an extreme time crunch mind you because I lost half my time with him so I quickly moved to ask about how his entrepreneurial journey began thinking he was give a nice intro to the piece I needed. He said:

“I had started my first company, I’d just turned thirty. The first year was good, the second year it fell apart. And there I was, I owed $100,000 that I didn’t have, to the bank, to suppliers and in Ireland and England, when the bank is owed money they’re secured against your house. So for me, I was thirty, had done my first start up, was a year into it and here I was looking at my son, my three year old son lying asleep in bed, tears streaming down my face, not knowing how I was going to keep the roof over the home of my family.”

At this point, I’ve got goose bumps, my jaw as well as the crew’s jaws are on the floor and I’m kicking myself because this is not what I came to film that day (long story) and I was not going to have enough time to get the footage and dialogue necessary to do this story any justice relative to bringing it to life in a video (another long story on the arch of a story I’ll cover in a future blog). This was GOLD we were listening to, but I had to move on because it wasn’t my goal that day to get this story. I was there to film more of his current social entrepreneurial efforts for this. Here is one of the finished vignettes we did to give an idea of what I was trying to film:

This vignette is a compilation of 4-5 different sound bites sewn together and cut-down from 5 minutes to just over a minute (very typical for what I do). I wasn’t going to have the time to get the social entrepreneurship vignettes I needed as well as get the sound bites to really tell the story he had gotten into about being in a place where he didn’t know what to do next. I knew though that Philip would be a trooper and would one day let me come back and film him again and get that story and produce a video piece that will bring tears hope and joy to the viewers eyes because that is what I do. He agreed to a future date so I’m feeling much better about that. Long story short, we were getting some of the last segments done on his social entrepreneur efforts for Glimmer and being rushed I wasn’t ecstatic about what we had shot, but I knew we had what we needed and it would be really good (Philip makes everything priceless because he is just really good on camera and speaks from the heart).

At this point we were pretty much out of time and we needed to wrap, but I felt Murhpy kicking at me in a good way to do something different and unplanned. Hence, I asked Philip if there is anything he’d like to leave us with or say to folks that might see some of these videos. Without missing a beat, taking a break, referring to notes or even pausing to think about it, he looked directly into the camera and made a beautiful appeal to the world to help him erase poverty. Keep in mind that what I usually create for video is multiple sound bites & segments and thoughts sewn togehter to craft the end piece. This piece below has motion graphics, title cards, music and multi-camera shots in it, but I promise you it was just as good without this packaging and incredibly “make your arm hair stand on end” in person:

It was an AMAZING way to end the day and made me forget about everything that went wrong up to that point really bringing it home to just flow with the current of the day and let Murhpy guide me just a bit. It wasn’t planned & I probably wouldn’t have gotten it had things gone the way they were suppose to, but Philip had a presence about him that relaxed all the more and enabled this to happen for us simply because we allowed it to be.

I’ll leave you with something Philip said that day as I had shared with him my many failures over the years and how he had really inspired me by his story. And that day specifically had reminded me that Murphy can be a good teacher in his own ‘special’ way if you stop for a second and let him do his thing.

“I think the greatest lessons for any entrepreneur are those that he draws from his failures”