We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Madeline Coronato. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Madeline below.
Madeline, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
Through the time constraints of tight deadlines and the responsibility of properly showing up for our crew, my business partner and I have forged our resilience as both producers and business owners. While we were fundraising for our film, Sight, last summer and fall, we got over the fear of rejection pretty quickly. We found it did not matter as much if we had not heard back from certain invited attendees nor potential business sponsors; what mattered most is if we were meeting our goal of having 100 attendees at our event and if we were raising enough funds to pay our film crew adequately. One person’s opinion or inability to donate did not change our ever pressing timeline for our all of our pre-production goals. However, through the resilience of doing mass but meaningful outreach for this event and for this film, we found so many unexpected positive responses from people we never would have expected had we not persisted.
Through this process we reframed our definition of failure by not seeing failure in rejection but rather in the inability enact step by step goals. As long as a person is consistently working away at any project they are meant to be met with rejection and criticism but these rejections and criticisms also help to shape and enhance the quality of a project.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Sadithi De Zilva and I started Scrappack Productions as two people who had a shared love of acting, filmmaking and garbage animal memes. Ms. De Zilva and I first became best friends while living together as roommates back in Summer of 2021. She and I would often be each other’s readers for self tapes and through that we found so much joy in creating, joking and telling stories together. This realization led us to writing, producing and acting in our first short film, Just One More Thing, a dramedy about two young twenty somethings who have just one night to complete time pressing, career altering projects. From working together on Just One More Thing, we found developed a deep trust and love for working together which led to starting our production company together. This past year, shortly after founding Scrappack Productions, we produced and co-directed our first official short film, Sight, a film about a couple trying to find a pair of prescription glasses amidst a zombie apocalypse. This process only deepened our confidence in pursuing our dreams and our trust in each other as partners.
Sadithi and I both are fortunate to share the same work ethic, craving to learn as we go and we share the same optimistic belief that everything will always work out as its meant to. Furthermore, our strengths and knowledge in filmmaking and business contrast and complement each other. I am truly fortunate to have a partner who builds me up and pushes me to be the best we can possibly be.
In moving forward, our dream is produce feature films that are genre melding and have characters that have incredibly rich and dynamic stories and personalities. We are want to tell stories where there is a void in representation, whether that is in regards to a character’s background or in concepts for stories that have never been explored. We love producing because we are able to hire on people we love to work with and focus on projects we feel most motivated to bring into reality. Scrappack Productions is founded on the principles of being community cultivating and being resourceful with how we produce. Whether it is in the beginning stages of pre-production or in the middle of filming, all film processes require: positive thinking, quick problem solving and a kind and hardworking team of people. Our goal with Scrappack productions is to continue to create innovatively and continue to take care of our entire team as best as we possibly can.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think the three qualities that I have found to be the most impactful for our journey are: doing the work and not getting stuck in your head about it, making time effective schedules and assuming best intent in the people you are working with.
With producing or heading any project, I have realized I do not have to wait to learn everything about everything as a filmmaker, I, as a producer, just have to know enough to make sure my crew has all of their essential needs met to succeed. For example, I do not have to know everything about every specific cinema camera out there, but I do have ensure that my camera crew has a place to charge their essential gear, a place to go to the restroom or warm up from the outdoors and food to eat and time to rest and recover. I have found in my time working at all different levels of different film projects that worrying about not knowing everything will leave you paralyzed from making the next step towards your goals. You do not need to know everything, you just have to know what the next few steps are and then actually act on those following steps. Granted, I love to learn and believe in the practice of trying to learn new things as much as I am able to. However, sometimes the need for things to be perfect or to know everything before you act only leads to further paralysis. Knowledge only gets a person so far—really success is dependent on action and outreach.
The second most important quality is creating a time efficient schedule of deadlines for any project you are working on, especially when managing a bigger team. Projects and goals will always be pushed off if there is not a deadline to motivate people to finish whatever they need to finish. Creating deadlines also ensures that everyone is on the same page for the pacing and is a clear way of keeping people accountable for being productive.
The third most important quality is assuming best intent with the people you are working with. Everyone—especially in the film industry–is always juggling multiple jobs, relationships and differing responsibilities. Someone on your team could be super excited to be working on the project you have hired them on for—but perhaps they did not see the contract or email you sent them because they have been overburdened with other work or they had a death in their family. A person can never fully know all that is going on in another person’s life unless they follow up with them in a curious, unassuming and positive way. Assuming best intent with the people you are working with will often lead to a positive self-fulfilling prophecy and further garner trust in that relationship.
I believe these qualities are the most impactful because all three of them help to hold you and your team the most accountable and enable you all to be actionable with your goals. As I said before, knowledge and ideas only get you so far and ultimately an idea does not matter if all it does is sit on a shelf. In order for any idea to be successful there has to be a plan of action to make it a reality and there has to be a team supporting it to make it happen.
Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
Often when I am my most overwhelmed it is because I have too many different parts of projects I need to work on and have not taken time to properly prioritize them. Or another reason I get overwhelmed is I do not know enough about a problem that has arisen and I catastrophize about it. So when I am feeling overwhelmed I try to first step away from the problem regulate my breathing and thinking, maybe do something to direct my focus elsewhere, then come back to the problem with a calm state of mind, logic and reason. Usually when I have a more clear head and am approaching a problem in a calm and curious manner the solution will bubble up. More often than not, the best solution ends up being the simplest solution, I just could not see due to my own anxiety.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.scrappackproductions.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madelinecoronato/?igsh=dzM0b3gxZmt0MnJh&utm_source=qr#
Image Credits
Pam Torres for the photos with the garbage can in them, Sadithi De Zilva for the photos with me with brown hair on set and then the pictures with the colorful backgrounds that have both Sadithi and me in them were taken by Cat Yudain.
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
