The Path to Director of Production: Build Your Leadership Brand
Your leadership brand shares the story of who you are and what you stand for which can help bring about opportunities aligned with your career goals. Defining that brand and executing on it are key when advancing in your career.
Julie Peng is the Director of Production at ILMxLAB, Lucasfilm's award-winning immersive entertainment studio, where she leads talent and capacity strategy and oversees production management for ILMxLAB’s global studios. Her career spans over twenty years of experience in CGI production management in film, television and immersive projects, and her passions for storytelling and innovation have drawn her to production leadership roles in future-focused organizations like ILMxLAB and Nickelodeon Digital Lab, and first-of-kind projects such as Nickelodeon Movies/Paramount PIctures’ first CG animated feature film Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and Lucasfilm Animation inaugural production, Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Read below to learn more about Julie’s career trajectory leading talent and product management in various industries like film and television, and how she authentically branded herself through out her roles that led her to the director role she is in now.
Career
What do you love about making films?
I love the storytelling process, and I am especially passionate about exploring the new ways of storytelling that are emerging with advancements in technology such as mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that contribute to creating the next generation of connected experiences. The prospect of being able to not only watch stories, but be immersed in them is infinitely exciting! Our head of studio at ILMxLAB, Vicki Dobbs Beck, elegantly describes our mission as “…aspiring to transition from storytelling – one-way communication – to storyLIVING where you’re inside a world making meaningful choices that drive the narrative forward.” Using bleeding-edge technology to create immersive, dynamic, interactive narrative experiences will lead to us all having a more personal connection to stories and characters, and contributing to this mission is what makes me excited to go to work every day.
What is your role in making films? What is your typical day like?
For most of my career, I worked in production management in animated feature films and television series. My responsibilities were to project manage productions, which included ownership of schedules, budgets, staffing, workflow, and productivity, as well as being accountable for achieving the project’s time, money and quality targets.
In my current role as Director, Production at ILMxLAB, my role is to establish and oversee the organizational infrastructure that enables us to operate and produce the type of work that we want to create. It includes managing studio operations, establishing production best practices, and overseeing talent strategy and capacity management. My typical day includes a lot of meetings! One of the things I love about my organization’s culture is that it is highly collaborative and inclusive, so I enjoy the high volume of interaction. To make sure I have time to do the work I need to do to deliver on my commitments, I also set aside some meeting-free ‘focus time’ each day, and 10 minutes of ‘daily retrospective’ time for myself at the end of each day to reflect on what happened that day and prepare my task list and make schedule changes for the next day.
“Having a manager that is actively involved in your growth and in an organization where you have a sense of belonging will contribute to your career development and advancement more than anything else.”
What is an example of a type of project you work on?
In animation, I worked on television series such as Star Wars: The Clone Wars, feature films such as The Simpsons Movie, Nickelodeon’s Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and George Lucas’s Strange Magic, and many smaller projects such as commercials and music videos.
At ILMxLAB, we create next generation, immersive story experiences for XR (extended reality) platforms like virtual reality, augmented reality, real-time cinema, theme park entertainment and others. I am fortunate to have been with ILMxLAB since the beginning and have contributed to all of our projects to date, including in-home VR experiences like Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge and Vader Immortal: A Star Wars Series, and location-based experiences like Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Damage Control and Wreck-it-Ralph: Ralph Breaks VR.
You have 20+ years successfully managing digital content production, how has technology improved the way you and your team work on projects?
Creating story-based entertainment content is such a deeply collaborative process. The quality of our creative product is directly impacted by our ability to closely collaborate in real time. The advancement of team collaboration tools such as Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom Meetings, and others, have enabled us to spend much less time and effort in organizing and sharing information, and much more time in creative ideation and innovation.
When I started my career over 20 years ago, there weren’t efficient ways to share real-time project tracking data with a large number of people. We relied on time-latent processes like sending files back and forth over email, and even analog methods like magnetic white boards- which can work well for small, co-located groups, but does not work well for large, global teams. The advent of cloud-based team collaboration applications has enabled our teams to work together with timely and accurate project plans across locations and time zones, and we certainly could not have transitioned successfully to a hybrid work model or maintained productivity during the pandemic without these tools.
“Creating an organizational culture and structure that allows us to empower people to make decisions instead of waiting for decisions to be passed down from the top”
Leadership Brand and Executive Presence
How did developing a personal brand help you move up in your career?
During the first 10 years or so of my career, I wasn’t aware of the importance of personal branding as it related to career development. I was lucky in that I sort of developed the first version of my personal brand without realizing I was doing so, and without giving it much conscious thought. I always knew that I liked trying new things, both in my personal and professional life, and I made this known to my leaders by volunteering for new work opportunities like first-of-kind-type projects, building new business units within the organization, and endeavors that relied heavily on creative and technical innovation. These opportunities often weren’t highly sought after by my peers because they were regarded as risky or unpredictable. After achieving success in some of these experiences, I gained a reputation for embracing the unknown and enjoying starting things from scratch. This brand led me to opportunities across the industry, in growth during my 15 years at Lucasfilm, and to my role at ILMxLAB today.
Given you oversee a roster of people and various workflows, does your leadership approach vary when managing different people/projects? If so, what are some strategies/tactics you use?
Absolutely! Establishing mutual trust and respect is something I work hard to do with everyone across the board. But each person, department, team, and group has their own goals, expectations, and responsibilities that contribute to their context and perspective. Empathy is the primary tool that I use to understand each of their needs and how I can best serve them. Whether it be through decision-making, support, guidance, or advocacy, my contribution to their success relies on my ability to “put myself in their shoes’ to understand their context.
Building Confidence:
How was your experience going from a Senior Manager to Director? What are the core differences in these roles?
For me, the core difference between my Senior Manager and Director roles has been the proportion of tactical responsibility versus strategic responsibility. As a Senior Manager, though I had some responsibility for “steering the ship,” I was also still heavily involved with making the ship move forward day-to-day. As a Director, creating strategies and strategic decision-making is my predominant focus.
I’m a little over a year into my Director role and I feel that I am still working on my transition to the Director mindset. Having been a project-focused manager/producer for many years, it has taken some time for me to become comfortable with being less involved in day-to-day tactics.
“Empathy is the primary tool that I use to understand each of their needs and how I can best serve them. Whether it be through decision-making, support, guidance, or advocacy, my contribution to their success relies on my ability to ‘put myself in their shoes’ to understand their context.”
How do you help people on your team build the confidence to develop their own leadership presence?
Feeling at ease and confident as a leader comes from study and practice. The ‘study’ part is usually easier – there are many meaningful internal and external learning resources for management tools and techniques on topics such as team motivation, inclusion strategies, critical conversations, etc. that I share with the team. The ‘practice’ part is often trickier – it sometimes takes “the stars to align” to match people with the leadership opportunities that best suit them, for example: types and timelines of projects, etc. Generally, there are three things I try to facilitate:
1. Matching people to opportunities that enable them to leverage their strengths while having ownership and accountability for the work of a group/team.
2. Creating an organizational culture and structure that allows us to empower people to make decisions instead of waiting for decisions to be passed down from the top.
3. Making sure emerging leaders have a manager/coach to help guide them through leadership responsibilities that are new to them. Outside of our immediate team, our HR Business Partners and Learning & Development teams are amazing partners who support us in this.
Resources
Are there any books/podcasts/meetups you recommend for continuing to grow and develop your leadership skills and brand?
I am currently inspired by the work of Frances X. Frei, a Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, and a thought-leader in culture-building. I recommend her TED Talk, Frances Frei: How to build (and rebuild) trust; her recent book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, or any of her content (articles, Podcast interviews, etc.) available online.
Anything else you’d like to share with the ModelExpand community?
There are many job opportunities out there, and it can be tempting to be lured by flashy job titles and lucrative offers from prominent companies. Try not to lose sight of the importance of finding an organizational culture that aligns with your style and sensibilities, and a manager that is invested in helping you realize your potential. Be confident in your abilities and know your worth, and make sure that your career advancement expectations align with your organization’s. Having a manager that is actively involved in your growth in an organization where you have a sense of belonging will contribute to your career development and advancement more than anything else. Thank you so much to ModelExpand for the opportunity to share my story!
We are excited to have Julie at ModelExpand’s Women in Leadership Breakfast Series: How To Build Your Leadership Brand + Executive Presence on September 16th from 9:00am-10:15am PT.
RSVP below to join the webinar and receive the recording afterwards
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