Video production isn’t always easy.

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The hours can be long, the intensity can be high, and not everyone’s dream job involves heated conversation about the best lens to use to capture the final shot of the day just as the sun’s setting. Fortunately, at Paragon Pictures we’re passionate about every aspect of video production.

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If you’re going to put your faith in us to help realize your vision on digital video, that’s important to know. In this blog, we’ll explain exactly where our passion comes from. And why we’d rank it up there with any other skill that we’ve got.

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Treat your first like your last, last like your first 

At the start of your career, you need passion to carry on going. Breaking into video making isn’t easy, and there’s a shedload of rejection and working for free before you can even think about calling this a career. But once you’ve got to a certain level of success, you need to be passionate so as to avoid becoming complacent about what you do. The technologies and ideas involved in video making are always evolving. What looks mindblowingly cool and cutting edge in 2019 isn’t going to do so in 2020 or 2021. That means that there’s always more to learn. If you’re not progressing, your work will become boring. And we’ll become bored of what we’re doing. Even from a self-serving perspective, we never want that to happen. That means never resting on our laurels.

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All of us can honestly say that we approach every new brief with the same level of enthusiasm as we did the first time we got to do this professionally. As the saying goes, “treat your first production like your last, and your last production like your first.” We know that we do this. We’re driven by not just doing work that we’re personally happy with; we also want to create work that our clients are proud of. If that means the start of a long working relationship with a client, that’s brilliant. If it’s a “one and done” but we leave them with fond memories of Paragon Pictures, we’ll still go home happy.

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Job satisfaction takes many forms

Because all of us do slightly different jobs at Paragon, job satisfaction comes in a variety of forms. For Ste, it’s all about completing an awesome edit he can sit back and watch with pride. For Sam, it’s putting together a production; piling the building blocks and elements that are required to facilitate a shoot. For Jay, it comes from assembling a creative vision and then seeing that vision come to life on set. For Jono, it’s taking the raw footage of a shoot and building it into a visual story. For Nina, it’s taking numbers and figures and working out how to make sense of them to create the best finished product possible. Each of us is driven by slightly different things, but all of us have the same passion and commitment as each other. (Which may explain why we all decided to go into business together.)

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Shooting videos isn’t always glamorous and fun. But being passionate about what you’re doing helps you find joy in the obstacles. If at any point during a creative endeavor, we find ourselves ever compromising by saying “that’ll do,” we’ll know that we’ve lost the spark that makes us special as a company. It hasn’t happened yet -- and we hope it never will.

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We take our work seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. This can be a stressful job, and at times it would be unbearable if we weren’t driven by the end results and the fact that, well, this is what we love doing. We don’t think anything else in our lives could possibly beat this. 

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Ultimately, that’s what gets us up every morning. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

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