Free the Work, the industry nonprofit geared toward promoting diversity in commercial production, has teamed with Goodby Silverstein & Partners on Residence, an artist-in-residence program designed to open up real-world opportunities for diverse directors. 

The initiative arrives as the industry has tried to make good on commitments to diversity, including in the specific area of production. While recent years have seen more diverse talents step behind the camera, big-ticket events such as the Super Bowl show that the industry still has a long way to go, with such jobs still largely going to the expected A-List white male directors. 
 

“The design of Residence was really meant to create and facilitate very meaningful collaboration between the agency and the makers to bring our stories to life,” said JP Patterson, director of film content and partnerships at GS&P and creator of Residence. “The real heart of it is bringing fresh perspectives to the work that we're creating earlier on in the process. That has a lot to do with diversity, creating economic opportunity for more filmmakers.”

The Residence program begins today and will give creative experience and training to a cohort of a dozen directors on the Free the Work platform every three to four months. Among those in the current lineup are Shaandiin Tome, winner of the best short documentary for “Long Line of Ladies” at the 2022 SXSW film festival, Shadae Lamar Smith, will.i.am’s former creative director; and Kadri Koop, the cinematographer for “On the Line: The Richard Williams Story,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

Residence will consist of 100 hours of participation from each cohort over the span of 15 weeks. During that time the directors will participate in guest lectures, agency workshops, makers meetups, director 1:1 meetings with program leaders. Members of the production and marketing community will be involved, including Invisible Collective, Whitehouse Post and Carbon VFX. Some weekly topics include signing with a production company, how to craft treatments for commercial projects, pitching and presentation techniques, bringing diversity to your crew and rate negotiations. 

The agency and Free the Work curated a list of 250 directors before finally narrowing it down to the first 12, all of which have a specific type of directing skill and specialty. The program will be led by Patterson and Sophie Zelon, who joins as Residence program manager. 
 

Each director will be paid a stipend for their time in the program and will also be compensated for any time spent in collaboration with the agency working on projects, pitches and more. While it is fully remote, there will be in-person events such as the welcome cocktail party in Los Angeles on June 23 and the GS&P agency meet and greet in San Francisco. 

 Pamala Buzick Kim, executive director at Free the Work, said that the program is meant to “level the playing field,” adding that it will get “not necessarily new talent, but talent that is not as known, in the door.”

“The beauty of Residence is that now we have this deep bench,”  said Margaret Johnson, chief creative officer and partner at GS&P. “We have this collective of directors who are specialists in all kinds of things like animation, or comedy dialogue or documentarians and you can go deep on one specialty. For me, that's super exciting to have access to that for all of our creatives in house.”
 

Each director will get a Residence badge on their Free the Work profiles showing they’ve successfully completed the program. The goal is for each director to find new work through the meetups and connections made through the program.
 

This is the first official program GS&P and Free the Work are partnering on, but the two had also worked together in the past when the organization was originally called Free the Bid.

Free the Bid was founded in September 2016 by director Alma Har’el  (“Honey Boy”) to help ensure more representation for female directors. Initially, it had asked agencies and brands to pledge that they would bring women into the bidding process for directing their spots. It has since opened that up to other diverse talents and expanded into various other initiatives to bring diversity into other areas of production.

Directors are just the start. If the program is successful, GS&P and Free the Work would want to expand it to include more people in the filmmaker ecosystem, including composers, production designers and wardrobe stylists, Patterson said. 

“This is our first group coming through so we’re kind of building the plane as we’re flying it,” Johnson said. “We’re hoping that at the very least, these relationships will just continue as the first group comes and moves on and we’ll keep working with the ones who we had the most luck with."