Today we’d like to introduce you to Dana Gartland
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I started my career as a a dancer and then retrained as an actor in the UK. When I moved to New York for an acting job I began doing stand up comedy too, which is when I started writing. Writing my own jokes and stories and getting live, very instant feedback from audiences was a great training ground. I had contacts in the Movie Trailer business from my voiceover work and I’d also freelanced with a couple of boutique creative agencies when I was out of work as an actor in London. Some of those contacts ended up in New York at the same time as me and I started writing on their projects. So, Trailers and Content Creation is a world I fell into accidentally via acting and voiceover, but once I started writing, I didn’t look back. I’d found something that I utterly loved and the work just kept on coming. Let’s just say that wasn’t always the case for me in voiceover!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I believe no road worth traveling is smooth. It’s the bumps, lumps, and obstacles that help you grow. When you change careers it can feel daunting. Whether anyone is forming opinions about you or not, you can sometimes torture yourself with your own thoughts about what you think other people might be thinking of you. You can hear the ridiculousness of that sentence as you read it, but despite that – and even though rationally you know it’s an absolute waste of your time, (because everyone is too busy worrying about their own life to spend quality time dissecting yours) – it can be a cycle that’s hard to break. The Trailer world can be a very male dominated one. Most of the Trailer shops are owned by men, most Trailer editors are men. Not all, and there are some absolute powerhouse female editors/CD’s out there blazing a trail. Helen Ahn is the best of the best, to name just one, but the industry does skew male over all, so it can feel intimidating.
When I’m leading a team, I’m a big believer that a good idea can come from anywhere in the room and I constantly have to grant myself that same courtesy – why not me? I’m also a big advocate for getting more female voiceover artists on promos and trailers and that can be a hard sell, but I think it’s important to advocate for it on certain projects. It’s common to hear “but that’s how it’s always been” when trying to forge a new path in any arena. It’s only been that way because someone once said “This is how it is.” So I always pose the question, “What if we say, this is how it will be now?” The industry is constantly changing and it’s important that we shine a light on a diverse range of talent, not just repeat what’s gone before. Marie Westbrook is a phenomenal talent in the voiceover world and it’s a real thrill to hear her on Academy Award winning films like “Women Talking.” The irony of having a male VO on this would not have been lost on its audience I’m sure.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
What I love most about my work and what simultaneously terrifies me is the blank page aspect. Very often when a client comes to me, they will have a one or two line brief about the angle they want to pursue when marketing the movie or TV show. And I have the freedom to create ideas for special shoots or live events and/or social media platforms that center around the project, but don’t rely on footage from it. I love having a free reign and I think/hope my background, initially as a dancer and then actor means that I understand what a theatrical experience should look and feel like. I’ve been on both sides of it and that is beneficial. I also love the other end of the spectrum when you’re given a tight turnaround and only three cards in a trailer to create copy that lands. You have the film footage and only that to work with so the parameters are much tighter, but these guardrails help focus the creative. The editors I work with are wonderfully rigorous and we’ll go back and forth over one word sometimes to ensure we’re hitting the message as succinctly and elegantly as possible. Too many words on a card in a trailer guarantees your audience won’t read it, so saying the most with the least is the name of the game in this particular aspect of my work. The work I’m most proud of, sadly didn’t get to see the light of day due to the strikes last year. It was for Trolls – Band Together – the third installment in the Trolls franchise. It was a spoof of the MTV documentary “Behind the Music.” We created a “Brozone – Behind The Beats” episode. There was so much room to play and so many lovely little riffs on popular culture and wordplay opportunities through The Trolls lens. Getting a TV spot for The Barbie campaign also felt like a big win as that film was such a huge moment and everyone was writing on it.
What’s next?
I love what I do, genuinely and passionately and I want to keep growing Foxhawker. I am also very fortunate to have so many talented writers in my life like Meg Dudley, Jo Dockery, Jessica Gunning, to name a few. They all write compelling scripts about ordinary women who do extraordinary things, some fictionalized and some based on true events. I’d love to expand Foxhawker so that we had an incubation department where we could develop the work of upcoming female and non binary writers and eventually get these narratives out into the world. Growth is always the plan, most importantly with the scope of work we create and the opportunities we can offer. Every time I get to work with a new Trailer House or studio, I feel so lucky and I want that trajectory to continue. And the thing I look forward to every day is my early morning walk. If I don’t walk, I can’t write. There’s something about clearing out yesterday’s thoughts on the walk and making space for the day that helps me enormously, so that’s a non negotiable. I don’t have any big changes planned, just little ones day by day that will hopefully add up to something worthwhile.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.foxhawker.com
