The worst reel I ever watched came from a guy who couldn’t stop talking about how good it was.
I won’t name names or markets, but I’ve sat across from more than one videographer who pulled up their portfolio with the kind of genuine excitement that really ought to be reserved for a first-born kid or a walk-off grand slam — and then walked me through footage that was, charitably, rough.
Shaky handheld in spots that needed a tripod. Audio that sounded like it was recorded inside a pillow. Color grades that looked like someone had spilled a latte on the color wheel.
And they’d be beaming.
I always found that fascinating, in a slightly horrifying way.
Me, I’m on the complete opposite end. I’ll watch back something we shot — something a client loved, something they played at their company’s annual meeting to actual applause (yes, really) — and my brain will lock onto the one rack focus that went a little soft and the one L-cut that landed a half-beat late.
Meanwhile, I’ve somehow convinced myself that every other production company within 200 miles is quietly putting out prestige-level work while I’m over here making glorified home videos.
It’s a special kind of torture, I’ll tell you that.
But here’s the thing — there’s actual science behind why both of those reactions happen. And once you understand it, you can’t unsee it.
“The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”
David Dunning, Cornell University
It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, based on research published in 1999 by Cornell University psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They ran a series of experiments measuring how people evaluate their own competence in logical reasoning, grammar, and humor. What they found was uncomfortable.
People who were bad at something didn’t just fail at that thing. They failed to recognize that they’d failed. Bottom-quartile performers were scoring at the 12th percentile and ranking themselves at the 62nd. They were, by a significant margin, the last to know.
Dunning explained it to the New York Times this way: “The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”
That’s the brutal part. If you don’t have the eye for good video yet, you literally cannot see what’s wrong with your own work. You’re bounded by the limits of your own taste — like a pianist who’s only learned one song and has no idea there’s a whole world of songs he doesn’t know.
The guy with the bad reel isn’t lying to you. He cannot see what you’re seeing. (And, perversely, there’s a small part of you that almost envies that.)
The effect runs in reverse, too. Highly skilled people tend to underestimate their abilities. They assume that what feels natural to them feels natural to everyone. They’re more aware of their own gaps. The ceiling they can see is always just a little higher than where they’re currently standing.
Sound familiar?
So if you’re the type who’s never quite satisfied with your work — who can always find the thing that’s wrong — that’s probably not a design flaw. That gap between your taste and your current output is the engine that drives improvement. The videographer who’s happy with everything he shoots isn’t going anywhere.
The videographer who’s happy with everything he shoots isn’t going anywhere.
That said, the self-critical thing can get counterproductive if you let it run the show. I know this firsthand. There’s a version of this where you finish a project and feel weirdly hollow about it even when the client is over the moon — where you can’t get out of your own head long enough to register that you did something good.
At some point self-criticism stops being a useful tool and starts being an excuse to never feel like you’ve arrived. That’s not useful either. The more practical question is: how do you get an honest read on where you actually stand?
The quick answer is to find someone qualified and ask them directly. Real feedback from a working videographer is worth more than a hundred supportive comments from friends who think everything you make is great. If you’ve got a mentor, a trusted peer, or even a professor you can still call, use that. Hand over your recent reel, tell them to be honest, and actually be ready for what comes back.
Be ready for real, I mean. Not performatively. If the critique stings, resist the urge to explain your choices. The defensiveness is natural, but it’ll shut down the feedback loop immediately. Swallow it, sit with it, and figure out which part of it is true. The part that’s true is where you start.
If you don’t have access to that kind of honest critic, there’s a decent workaround. Pull together your best recent work alongside three or four examples from other producers working at a similar level — not industry names, just working professionals whose output feels like it’s in the same neighborhood as yours.
Show them to someone you trust. Don’t tell them which is yours. Ask what they like, what they don’t, and why. Listen for patterns. You might be surprised which direction that lands.
The long game against sucking, though, is to just make it structurally hard to stay bad. That means watching a lot of work — not just stuff you love, but stuff you want to reverse-engineer. It means breaking down the shots that stop you cold and figuring out exactly why they work. It means staying just uncomfortable enough that you’re always picking up something new.
There’s more good free education available right now than at any other point in the history of this industry. Tutorial content, production breakdowns, working professionals who’ll walk you through their entire process in detail — it’s out there.* Some of it is excellent. Some of it is, irony of ironies, a live demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. But the more you’re actively studying the craft, the better you get at telling the difference.
And that’s really the whole game. Taste develops before skill does. For a while you can clearly see that your work isn’t where you want it — but you can’t quite close the gap yet. That’s a frustrating place to live. But it also means your eye is already ahead of your hands, and eventually the hands catch up.
Taste develops before skill does. That gap is frustrating to live in — but it means your eye is already ahead of your hands.
The guy beaming at his bad reel? He’s not in this conversation.
*Philip Bloom’s site has been a reliable resource for working videographers for well over a decade. If you’re not already familiar with it, fix that.