Debbie Millman has an ongoing project at PRINT titled “What Matters.” This is an effort to understand the interior life of artists, designers, and creative thinkers. This facet of the project is a request of each invited respondent to answer ten identical questions and submit a nonprofessional photograph.
Finn Ross has been a pioneer in video design and media servers since the early 2000s, designing productions worldwide and integrating video seamlessly with other theatrical elements to create compelling experiences on prestigious stages like Broadway and the West End. His work with FRAY Studio focuses on pushing boundaries in live entertainment, particularly in projects with complex video design ambitions, often incorporating innovative technologies and leading large, multidisciplinary teams.
What is the thing you like doing most in the world?
I love being in a room full of people and working together to bring an idea alive. Most commonly for me, this happens during production rehearsals for a show. After months of everyone working separately in their various studios and having many meetings in between, we come together with the physical world of the show in front of us and start to blend all our ideas. I love this time because what might have started out as a simple idea can become a vast, nuanced, and beautiful thing with the input of many different people.
I also find the process of shaping an idea in time and physical space incredibly interesting. The power of video to accentuate, articulate, or heighten a moment within the storytelling of the show is amazing. It’s truly remarkable when the collective imagination and skill of video, scenic, lighting, sound, performers, and production lands delicately and precisely at the crossroads of music and drama. The whole process is dangerously addictive. You live in this heightened reality for the period in which you are making the show. Things like laundry, bills, insurance, and all the mundane aspects of life seem to fade away, and you spend your every moment creating something with other people.
After you finish, it’s kind of like a really big comedown, which is hard to adjust back to the normality of everyday life.
What is the first memory you have of being creative?
I was probably about 12 when I first held a camera in my hand. It was a realization that even though I couldn’t paint, draw, sculpt, or do anything involving physical coordination to make something creative, a camera might be my tool to allow this to happen. From that moment on, I became very interested in how a camera allows you to tightly control composition. The singular view that a photograph presents, gives you, as the creator, an enormous emotional power to color how a viewer understands or sees the image you are making. Live performance has a similar quality; all you need to do is shift a few things around in the most simple of ways, and you have the power to bend reality for the audience.
What is your biggest regret?
When I was younger, I wish I had taken myself more seriously as a creative person and not continually believed I was an impostor. I feel like the society I grew up in was suspicious of creativity. To be creative was considered weird, and the school’s career adviser laughed me out of the room when I said I wanted to work in theatre. However, I was lucky. The school I attended had an amazing drama department, and I had an incredible teacher (THANK YOU Miss Wheeler) who gave me the belief that I could make a career out of this. If it wasn’t for this teacher, I may not be talking to you now.
However, I still feel uncomfortable calling myself an Artist. I am very rooted in being a Designer, and I feel comfortable in that role, but applying the term “artist” feels very different. As a designer, I feel like I use art to solve problems, but as an artist, the page is totally blank, and only I can fill it in. I am much more comfortable with this role now, but I wish I had given myself permission to inhabit it more when I was younger.
How have you gotten over heartbreak?
Good friends and lots of alcohol!
What makes you cry?
Two things tend to make me cry. First, gross acts of social injustice where the system people are living in has let them down. I remember coming in to land at Heathrow the day after the Grenfell Tower fire had been finally extinguished and seeing the horrific charred remains of the building on London’s landscape. It brought tears to my eyes; it was a great big scar on our city and a huge symbol of how those in authority had let those they were supposed to care for down and weren’t willing to be held to account or blame.
The next and more cheerful stimulus to tears is random acts of beauty. When I read about the two gay penguins at Sydney Zoo and how one of them had passed away, and his partner and the colony had sung in sadness at the passing, it was an incredible reminder of the simple, innocent beauty that could be found all around us, which is sometimes hard to keep in sight amidst all the cynicism and fear-mongering that goes on in the world.
How long does the pride and joy of accomplishing something last for you?
I do wish it lasted a little bit longer; then maybe I could do just a little bit less work and have a little bit more of a life. I think the problem with live entertainment is that it’s not simply a job; it’s more of a calling (or addiction). It has to be; otherwise, you wouldn’t commit so much of your time and give up so much of your own life in order to do it. Regularly working six days a week, 14 hours a day, can start to grind, but I also can’t imagine doing anything else, or maybe I don’t know how.
Do you believe in an afterlife, and if so, what does that look like to you?
I don’t hold any spiritual beliefs, such as in an afterlife or reincarnation. However, I believe everyone has an innate soul, and that gives us all the power to have an effect and create great change in the world.
What do you hate most about yourself?
Whenever I send work to a client for the first time, I instantly become stricken with panic and fear, continually checking my emails for their response because I don’t seem to be able to relax until I find out whether people love or hate something. I’ve been doing this for many years now, but I don’t seem to be able to get over this response and have the faith in my work that I know I should have.
What do you love most about yourself?
I find this a very difficult question to answer; I was brought up to be very cautious of having too much pride in oneself. However, one thing I feel really good about is that over the years, I have had many, many long-term collaborators keep coming back to work with me, which I find very rewarding because it must mean I’m doing something right! How else can you really know? What we do is deeply human. Critics and awards are one nice way to know you are doing something correctly; however, the fact that others find something rewarding in the creativity and process I have to offer is incredibly flattering.
What is your absolute favorite meal?
It sounds rather clichéd, but… filet steak from my incredible local butcher, fire-roasted potatoes, and spinach, all cooked on my BBQ with some serious red wine, ideally shared with my husband and friends in our back garden.
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