Producing Tomorrow's Producers: Team Building and Management with Álvaro Priante Merino

Álvaro Priante is an executive producer and a director who has lead all kind of productions: commercials, music videos, short movies and feature films. As director, Álvaro has co-directed together with Iván Roiz two feature films called Gigantes Descalzos (2017) and A Circle of Men (2021). 

His first film, Gigantes Descalzos, was released in more than 15 countries, taking part of several national and international film festivals such as Seminci, Habana Film Fest, Doc Feed or Miradas Doc. Furthermore, the film won some awards as Best Documentary Film in FICTS Milan 2017 and the Audience Award in Docs MX 2017. A Circle of Men, his second film as director, was launch at the platform Movistar tv and now it is available on Filmin.

Along his music video portfolio, there are pieces such as State of Mind of Cora Novoa or A Través de Ti of María José Llergo, both directed by Alex Gargot and that have been awarded in international festivals as UKMVA, Berlin Music Video Awards or Buenos Aires Music Video Festival. 

Álvaro Priante joined Grayskull in 2016 as producer and he was promoted to executive producer in January 2024. During these years he has produced commercials for directors as Los Perez, Augusto de Fraga, Alan Masferrer, Kinopravda, among others. Recently, his last production Call of the Kings was awarded at Ciclope 2024.

LBB> What advice would you give to any aspiring producers or content creators hoping to make the jump into production? 

Álvaro> Well, I mean, I am not that old or at least I don’t feel old enough to give advice to the aspiring producers but maybe what I can tell them is to be resilient.

Probably, the hardest days of a producer are when you’re starting and you feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to control and all the teams you need to be working with at the same time.

If you are unlucky, you can even receive the pressure from an EP, a director, the agency and the client all together and it can be too much, that’s totally true. In those hard days, it is always important to keep focused and as chill as possible and to never forget about the things we love about our job. 

LBB> What skills or emerging areas would you advise aspiring producers to learn about and educate themselves about? 

Álvaro> Team building and team management. To learn to care about the ones who makes your job possible. Be surrounded by people who you love and care so you are able to build a strong team. That’s the key skill for a producer, in my opinion. 

LBB> What was the biggest lesson you learned when you were starting out in production - and why has that stayed with you? 

Álvaro> It is linked with my previous answer. At the beginning, I was obsessed to get to work with “the best” and usually it was based on a technical basis. After a few years, I have realised that the most important thing is to work with good people, people you can trust. Of course, the technical skills are important but I wouldn’t say it is a key factor at all. 

When it comes to broadening access to production and improving diversity and inclusion what are your team doing to address this? In a Spanish environment, I would say now everything is to get feminised, we need to help women access key roles as head of departments. 10 years ago, we were all men but makeup and sometimes art dept. Now is getting different, it is still hard to find a female gaffer or a key grip but I am pretty sure there will be a day when this will change.

And as executive producers, we have the responsibility to support these women and help them take what should have been theirs long time ago. 

LBB> And why is it an important issue for the production community to address? 

Álvaro> I think it is an important topic for every business and of course for production companies too. Our aim is to be equal and to build the best teams possible and we can’t make that possible excluding 70% of the population. The time when we were all white guys is over. And I am almost a white guy, don’t get me wrong. But I think that us, hetero white guys, should be the first supporting the cause.

LBB> There are young people getting into production who maybe don’t see the line between professional production and the creator economy, and that may well also be the shape of things to come. What are your thoughts about that? Is there a tension between more formalised production and the ‘creator economy’ or do the two feed into each other? 

Álvaro> In my opinion, there is a huge difference between the 'formalised production' and a creator in terms of crew, structure and workflow. Our regular shooting crew is formed by 75-100 persons and I think that’s probably the best way to highlight the difference between the two models.

Of course, we have collaborated with content creators but what we try to do is not to disturb them because they know what they are doing and how to do it, so there is no need to force them to make things differently. Probably that’s our most common mistake when production companies work with content creators. 

LBB> If you compare your role to the role of the heads of TV/heads of production/executive producers when you first joined the industry, what do you think are the most striking or interesting changes?

Álvaro> I think there is a main change that has transformed the industry which is the digitalisation. Today’s production workflow has nothing to do with how things were when I started 15 years ago. 

On the other hand, as we previously spoke, the presence of females and having diverse production crews is change we need to make. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of old habits that we haven’t get ridden of but let’s try to keep forcing them to be changed.

LBB> When it comes to educating producers how does your agency like to approach this?

Álvaro> Honestly, I think a producer learns to produce by producing things. Of course, there has to be a training process but you don’t know in which personal and professional challenges a project can put you until you experience it. Probably, our biggest challenge when we have a training/junior producer is to support him/her and be next to them during every single production stage. 

LBB> It seems that there’s an emphasis on speed and volume when it comes to content - but to where is the space for up and coming producers to learn about (and learn to appreciate) craft? 

Álvaro> I am afraid I disagree with this, of course everything now is about speed and volume, but that makes the great craft to shine even brighter than before. The lack of good creativities is something that we have been suffering for years and that makes the task of looking for good craft very simple because there is only a few per year.

LBB> On the other side of the equation, what’s the key to retaining expertise and helping people who have been working in production for decades to develop new skills? 

Álvaro> I guess the most difficult part is to get excited for something that you have been doing for years. In my opinion, this is the best perspective to make an approach to new challenges. Trying to learn new production skills, tools, workflows so it’s easier to arrive to the office with a smile, at least on Fridays ☺ 

LBB> Clearly there is so much change, but what are the personality traits and skills that will always be in demand from producers? 

Álvaro> I don’t want to repeat myself but I think everything is about team building and team management. If you can keep your team together, the quality of the production is going to increase considerably. Same thing happens with personal careers, I wouldn’t be in the position I am right now if it wasn’t for the tremendous prod teams that I’ve been working with during my career.