There’s a trend on social media about showing the progress of your work, and that’s a problem.
For a while now, the prevailing wisdom across the internet has been: show your process. It’s a great way to build an audience. But I also think that over-sharing how and where you work can quietly damage the reputation of an artist, particularly filmmakers. It’s worth asking honestly, “Am I showcasing my process as a personal record? For clout? Or have I become the educator now?” And if so, how does that fit with your brand as an emerging filmmaker? Because first impressions still matter, and how someone remembers you can set the precedent for where you land in an already competitive field.
With music, painting, or writing, watching something be constructed from the ground up is genuinely interesting. Those crafts have rules you can break in ways that only sharpen your style and output. With filmmaking, you have a camera and you have a story, and those two things should be the only output on display if you’re serious about making this a lifelong career. Behind-the-scenes content is acceptable, provided it doesn’t breach confidentiality or compromise a filmmaker’s ability to submit to festivals. And even then, there are rules around how much of a story should circulate online if you’re aiming to screen at prestigious festivals.
That said, I’ll argue this: many city-based film festivals with consistent reputations have already selected their films well ahead of public announcements — not through submission platforms like Filmfreeway, but through paid distribution channels. The open competition is nearly gone for the kid who made a film with friends across combined weekends. We can point to directors who made films on time stolen between survival jobs, but funding is what matters most here. Many filmmakers who claim they struggled in the same way as a major production company tend to leave out the part where someone lent them a significant sum of money because they believed in the idea. It wasn’t a grocery clerk working three years full-time in Atlanta who made their magnum opus and earned the same attention as recent indie blockbuster hits. The label indie has become something of a contradiction — and that’s because the price tags on some of these films were nowhere near a grocery clerk’s salary.
The show-your-progress trend is, in my honest opinion, a trap. It creates a false sense that your work is reaching thousands of people who are genuinely gravitating toward your story. But before an audience can even appreciate what you’ve made, they arrive already primed for sympathy — simply because you opened with “this is how I…” or “…as an indie filmmaker…” They see a trying filmmaker before they see a filmmaker, and that framing can completely distort the viewing experience.
Think about it this way: when we travel, we approach airport staff — gate agents, front desk agents — with a question, a need, a want. Those needs are usually met because the staff are trained and know what they’re doing. But the traveler, much like an audience, doesn’t care about the weeks of training it took to get there. Their only concern is whether you can deliver the result they came for. That’s how a filmmaker should treat the job. The work the audience never sees — because that’s the training they don’t need to know about. What they care about is the delivery.
A useful case study: Curry Barker and Kane Parsons both have YouTube backgrounds, but neither made a sub-focus of their channels on being educators. Despite their depth of knowledge on the craft and the industry, they kept that to themselves and used it to their own advantage. It’s only now, in press, that they speak about their work in a way that educates curious fans — and that further amplifies the story we all already watched. Deliver before you explain. Let the work be the driving force of your career, not the process. Audiences don’t need justification for why your work should matter, and they shouldn’t feel obligated to care because you showed them how it was made. If the story has done its job, the footnotes are unnecessary.
Blindside them entirely. Your presence online, if you’re eager to share, should be about you — who you are as a person. Many filmmakers live private lives, and that privacy makes the work that much more compelling. There is a need to build an audience, yes — but build the right audience. Social media algorithms aren’t surfacing your film to a global audience the way you imagine, not when your feed is split between your story and explaining your cameras, your setup, your node chains. Curry Barker’s audience was made up strictly of people who craved entertainment, because the channel was skits, and only skits. The algorithm wasn’t sending their content to someone trying to configure a new Sony FX camera. It was sending it to people who wanted to be entertained. That’s the audience worth building.
At the end of it all, the work is the loudest thing in the room. It always has been. No camera setup, no process reel, no behind-the-scenes series will ever substitute for the moment an audience sits in the dark and feels something they weren’t expecting to feel. That’s the job. That’s always been the job. So protect your process the way you protect your best ideas — quietly, deliberately, and with patience that only makes sense to someone who truly believes in what they’re making. The world will find the work.
Let them find it the right way.
