Interns: Sports Choreographer Erin Cowan
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It’s great to hear that you take interns because I know that you are really a wonderful mentor and I can see that is important to you in the community here and with your friends that you’ve introduced me to. What do you look for when you take on an intern?
Erin Cowan: First and foremost is passion. They have to be very passionate about the sport. They have to be responsible. They have to have that creative side, to be an innovator and to be able to communicate. Again, communication is the most important thing. I have a couple of interns and I train them. They already know the sport (I pick them first for that particular sport) and I just teach them camera angles, how to talk to the athlete, or if we’re working with talent, how to coach the talent, and how to work professionally in that environment. To me, it’s like a secret society. I had one guy I worked with whose very first shoot was a multimillion dollar, multi-athlete shoot. We shot 18 professional athletes and that was his first shoot, his first major job -- and now he works for Nike. This is a kid I trained and worked with and who I mentored and now he works in sports marketing for Nike Basketball. And it was me just saying, "This is what we do, this is how we do it. I have this opportunity [for you], and I can pay you to do some things and you’ll probably do a little travel, and that’s it." Then just teaching them how Nike works. [Nike] is a matrix - knowing how their system operates and knowing what they look for [is important].
Read Erin's full interview here!
There's a particular kind of confusion that shows up in production offices lately, and it isn't about budgets or call times. It's about a handful of terms — usage rights, likeness rights, digital replicas, AI training, derivative content — that have started appearing in the same paragraph of a contract, often used as though they mean roughly the same thing.
They don't. And the gap between them is quickly becoming one of the more consequential distinctions in commercial production.
This vocabulary comes largely from entertainment law, a world most photographers, stylists, producers, and models were never trained to navigate. It's being absorbed into advertising and commercial contracts faster than most of the industry has had time to build a shared, plain-language understanding of what it actually covers. The result is a lot of very careful people signing very specific language without a clear sense of what they've agreed to.
So it's worth slowing down and taking each term on its own.