Johannes
Wiebus

How I work

I co-founded Jynx Productions in Yarmouth, Maine, in 2005 and have co-run it since. The steadiest thread is Galileo, the prime-time factual program on ProSieben, where we have been the exclusive US production partner for more than a decade. It is not the only thread. I have made segments and branded films for companies including Red Bull, and commissioned work for institutions: the International Finance Corporation, Bowdoin College, Deutsche Bank, the Maine Tourism Association. Some of it goes out to two million people on a weeknight. Some of it plays to a room of forty donors. The work of getting it right does not change much between the two.

Before Maine I spent five years at Bloomberg, producing and presenting German-language business news for the European channel and working with editorial teams in New York, London and Frankfurt.

These days I usually have four to six productions going at once, at different stages, all with fixed air dates. Requests come to me first. I build the schedule and I hire the crew out of a roster I have been adding to for twenty years: cinematographers, editors and sound operators I have worked with since the beginning. The budget is mine as well, anywhere from fifteen thousand dollars to a hundred and eighty.

What I like best is still the interview. Most of the people I film do not do this for a living. They are entrepreneurs, researchers, community members, families, and they have half an hour to say something true to a stranger with a camera pointed at them. Getting them there, and then protecting them in the edit, is most of the job. The rest is directing in the field and supervising the cut.