Sharon Chetrit is a Webby, Shorty, and Telly Award-winning director and visual artist whose work spans global campaigns, visual effects, and narrative filmmaking for brands including Microsoft, YouTube Music, Logitech, Mars, Motorola, Coca-Cola, and Dove. A fellow of the Warner Bros. TV Directors Lab, his work has screened at Cannes and the BAFTA-qualifying Aesthetica Film Festival, with campaigns also recognized by YouTube’s Best in Ads. Known for blending cinematic craft with emotionally driven visual storytelling, Sharon creates ambitious worlds where every image, effect, and camera move serves the story.
How many years have you been a judge?
This is my first year!
What are your responsibilities in your current role and what do you love most about your job?
As a director, I take an idea from its earliest creative stage through production and post, shaping the visual language, performances, camera, VFX, and overall emotional experience of the work. I often work on projects that combine live action with emerging technology, so a big part of my role is finding the right balance between innovation and storytelling. What I love most is starting with something that exists only as an idea and building an entire world around it, then watching that world create a real emotional response in an audience.
What inspired you to pursue your career path?
I’ve always been drawn to the place where emotion and spectacle meet. The filmmakers and artists I admired growing up could create images that felt larger than life while still making you feel something deeply human. That combination became the thing I wanted to chase in my own work: using filmmaking, visual effects, design, and technology not simply to create beautiful images, but to make those images carry emotion.
What was your first job in the industry? What did it teach you?
I started my career on the creative side of advertising, where I learned very quickly that a great idea has to survive real-world limitations: budgets, timelines, clients, production realities, and many different voices in the room. It taught me how important clarity of vision is. You need to know what is essential to the idea, what you can adapt, and what you have to protect.
What do you look for to determine excellence in video?
Point of view. I’m interested in work where I can feel that someone made a series of deliberate choices rather than simply executing something beautifully. Craft matters enormously: cinematography, performance, editing, sound, VFX, but the best work uses all of those disciplines in service of one clear idea or emotion. I always ask myself: could this have been made by anyone else? If the answer is no, that usually means there is a real voice behind it.
What initiatives or projects are you working on now that excite you?
I’m currently directing commercial work while continuing to explore the intersection of traditional filmmaking, visual effects, and generative technology. I’m especially excited by projects where these tools can expand what is creatively possible rather than simply make production faster. On the narrative side, I’m also developing a psychological thriller feature, which gives me the opportunity to push further into surreal, atmospheric storytelling and world-building.
Tell us about a moment of recognition that had an effect on you – whether personal or official? What does recognition mean to you and why is it important in our industry?
Winning the People’s Telly Award for my short film SOUP was particularly meaningful because it meant the work connected directly with an audience. Awards are never the reason you make something, but recognition can give a project – and the people behind it – a life beyond the moment it was created. In an industry where so much work is collaborative and so much creative risk happens behind the scenes, recognition is also a way of saying that those choices mattered. At its best, it encourages people to keep taking risks.
Do you have any specific practices you lean on to spark creativity?
I pull references from photography, architecture, fashion, painting, music, technology, and sometimes things that have nothing obvious to do with the project. I also like to reduce an idea to one emotional sentence before thinking about execution. Once I know what I want the audience to feel, decisions around the camera, performance, design, VFX, and pacing become much clearer.
In your experience, what is a significant change you are seeing happen in the video, television, and/or film industry, and what insight can you share about how to navigate it?
Generative AI is obviously changing our industry very quickly, but I think the deeper shift is that the ability to create sophisticated imagery is becoming increasingly accessible. As the technical barrier comes down, taste, authorship, and point of view become even more valuable.
My approach is to embrace the technology without allowing the technology to become the idea. Learn the tools, understand what they make possible, and then forget about them long enough to ask the same questions filmmakers have always had to ask: What is the story? Why does this image exist? What should the audience feel? The tools will continue changing. A strong creative voice is much harder to replace.
What excites you about judging for the Telly Awards?
I’m excited to see work from filmmakers, creators, agencies, and studios that I might not otherwise encounter, especially work that takes real creative risks. As a filmmaker, judging is also an opportunity to step outside my own process and think carefully about why certain ideas, images, performances, or pieces of craft stay with me. Having recently experienced the Telly Awards from the other side as a winner, it feels especially meaningful to now have the opportunity to recognize and celebrate the work of other creators.
