Film Courage: What job do you have at Netflix?
Tendayi Nyeke, Writer/Director/Producer: I’m currently working as a director and/or producer, depending on the project.
Film Courage: What’s your day like?
Tendayi: Currently we’re developing a feature film, so it’s very unsexy. I have a lot of people go You work in animation? Because I’m currently working for Netflix animation and they go Do you animate? I’m like No, there’s so many other jobs.
Right now we’re in the story room developing story. It’s every day talking about story, trying to break story, writing, trying to work out characters. It’s about four or five hours of those conversations. A lot of research, looking at images for inspiration, other films for inspiration on story arcs and shapes and plot, talking to storyboard artists.
You might pitch a scene or something and then a storyboard artist might actually storyboard it for you. It’s a combination of writing, a writer’s room (a little bit of writing), some visual development stuff, and loads of conversations and a bunch of research every day.
Film Courage: You are spending a good four hours or so with a group of writers?
Tendayi: Two, right now it’s a couple. A month ago we were in a room because our process was we developed for a little while and we’ve got an outline or something and we want to stress test some ideas. Then you bring a group of really smart people together that might have different styles of writing and they kind of like poke holes at it and stuff.
There was a moment when there were about 4 or 5 other writers in the room but the process we’re doing now is with two writers that bring different things that are super valuable to the story and then we’re working that out.
The producer will sometimes pop in and out and be like How about that? How about this? Just kind of we call it creative friction, again poke holes to elevate what you’re doing or to challenge some things that maybe you’re not thinking about…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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