Film, Television, and Video Production Life Cycle

Every phase of film and video development contains highly creative work, but that work can be sequenced, as shown in Table 14.1, in a traditional, linear life cycle. The preproduction phase contains the decisions that look most like project management, planning how to accomplish the goals of the script within the allotted time and budget.

Veteran assistant director Jerry Ziesmer wrote about the importance of preparation, organization, and focus. “Brian de Palma and Steven Spielberg studied each day's scenes and discussed how many shots they would need for every day's work. It took hours of thoughtful concentration.”²

Jeremy Schmidt and Matthew Scura, owners of Edge of Cinema, scale this process down for the live‐action video and documentaries they make for their customers. “We have taken that cinematic approach and applied it to the commercial world. We have a very organized preproduction process to where every little detail is thought out in advance. So, when we do get on set we can jump right into action and can move things fast. We can usually get what might be a full day of production in a half day and that saves the client money.”

Project Management Contributes to Success

Lyons will analyze the production schedule to keep projects within budget. He uses software specifically designed for breaking down a script and assembling the resources needed for each shot. “It allows us to reallocate resources to the scenes to give us the most bang for our buck.” And, if necessary, he recommends changes to the script. As an example, Lyons describes a scene from a recent project. “A secret agent has hidden weapons in a bus terminal in a foreign country. He was going to walk through the terminal, go to a set of lockers, take out a duffel bag of weapons, walk back out, get into his car, and drive off.” As a producer, Lyons sees the costs associated with this shot. “You have to go to another country, you have to put signage on every store that you see, change every license plate, make sure that the cars are what you want, and then you have to populate all of this with hundreds of extras. It was only half a page of story and actually no dialogue.” Lyons suggested an alternative, with the agent hiding the weapons in a locker that is buried in the desert. “We can do that in two hours and save a quarter of a million dollars. And they bought the idea.”

Leadership in a Fluid Environment

The best producers, according to Lyons, have the ability to prioritize. “The situations are fluid. People get sick. Locations fall out. Weather changes. I'm here to help people make a better show, to come up with the best possible paths through the difficulties while you keep in mind every department's issues. It's keeping all those balls in the air simultaneously.”

Michael Cardwell, owner of Digital Brew, juggles projects and priorities. Digital Brew produces Emmy Award–winning animated explainer videos for his customers' marketing campaigns. His projects have schedules that count on customer feedback to meet deadlines. When that doesn't happen, the schedule slides. “Our pipeline is a living organism because of that—it's like trying to hold water in your hands. It just doesn't stay there very long and you're always having to fill it back up.” Rather than using software to constantly update project schedules, the team uses visibility boards that allow all team members to see the status of every project. They can see who is busy, who is available, and what project needs attention. This means Cardwell can keep his team busy even though project schedules depend on the clients that are outside of his control.

A Project‐Driven Industry That Pioneered Its Own Management Practices

The ability to serve the goal of the script on time and on budget has been essential since filmmaking began over 100 years ago. It values the same processes and discipline as modern project management and rewards the same ability to lead within a dynamic environment.

Game Development Life Cycle

A common life cycle for creating and releasing a game follows the major steps identified in Table 14.2. It is a blend of waterfall and agile.

Shonkwiler emphasizes the highly iterative, creative work of preproduction and focuses on doing it quickly. For example, he'll put down an idea on paper in an hour, quickly push it to the team for feedback, and they get it back to him. “I can't sit in a room and design the perfect game. I have to hand it to somebody and watch them poke holes in it. Then we iterate. Paper is cheap. Writing and concept art is cheap. As soon as I apply a programmer or an artist or a full‐time designer, I start racking up big bills.” To put this in perspective, he expects a two‐year game development effort to spend about three months in preproduction.

By the end of preproduction, the core game idea is established. This milestone is critical for a studio with a new game, because that studio is probably trying to get enough funding to bring it to market.

Project Management Contributes to Success

The team size affects the formality of project management activities, pretty much like it would in every industry. A small game development team in a startup studio may avoid most formal project management practices as unnecessary overhead. After all, everybody can see what's going on all the time as they sit side by side at their computers.

Shonkwiler describes the production phase in a way that any corporate software developer would understand. Agile principles of software development create a game that grows sprint by sprint, always being tested, with new requirements selected from a product backlog. Risks are recognized and tracked. Scrum or Scrumban practices are common. Shonkwiler's book Creative Agility Tools, co‐authored with Clinton Keith, emphasizes flexibility. “A lot of teams struggle with adopting Scrum because they view it as a fixed process… . The best adoption of Scrum by companies ends up morphing into something unique.”³ As he discussed process, Shonkwiler emphasized that the practices must fit the needs of the team. “We worry about people first, and then how we're making a good game, and then how process can enable that.”

An example of taking care of people first is his approach to crunch, the game‐industry term for relentless workweeks that can tally up to 100 hours. Shonkwiler rejects this type of chronic overwork but does recognize the benefit of using it sparingly and in a way that brings teams together. “If we spend a little bit of time hyper‐focused on a goal, and everybody works two hours extra each day for a week—2 weeks maximum—we really gel and move forward.”

Quality Includes User Appeal

What makes one game more popular than the next? Measuring that kind of customer satisfaction is tough and critically important. Shonkwiler uses multiple strategies for hitting this target.

Product reviews at the end of sprints are a common agile practice. In game development each of the smaller teams show off what they've done to the entire team in a town hall format. Everyone can see how the game is evolving. The practice builds team spirit, creativity, and a common view of the evolving game.

Outside feedback is essential. “We start to bring people in to play and give us feedback. Once the feedback starts trending positively, we focus on making sure it becomes overwhelmingly positive. This iteration continues until the numbers are where we want them, or we have to ship.”

Balancing Creativity, Scope, Schedule, Cost, and User Experience

The magic of leading video game development is the ability to simultaneously maintain high engagement from a creative team over months or years to build an exciting product while staying within budget and shipping on time. Effective producers do that using the full range of project management, agile development, and team leadership tools.

Music Production Life Cycle

There are as many ways to conceive and record an album as there are artists. Indie groups looking for a breakthrough may rent a recording studio for just a few days. Established artists may write and collaborate as they record, surrounding themselves with song writers, studio musicians, engineers, and producers. Table 14.3 shows a practical progression that an A&R manager like Egerton or a freelance producer would use as a template for producing a song or an album. Oak Felder is a popular hitmaking songwriter/producer. Felder noted, “Used to be, writing a song back in the 1960s was, you sit at a piano and you pull out a pad, and you write a song, … Well, production is that now. You pull out a laptop, you have a keyboard, and you produce a track.”⁵

Project Management Contributes to Success

Project managers are frequently in the role of helping others succeed. As an example, Egerton recalls an incredibly talented young singer, signed in her teens, whose family had a long, successful history in the music industry. “So now we have this artist who has her own expectations in terms of career but who hasn't had to function on the level of an artist working with a major record label that has its own set of expectations. I balanced having to give her space to be the creative genius that she is, while at the same time helping pull her along in some areas of the business side of the music industry. The artist did all the heavy lifting, certainly. I mean, she sang all the lyrics and co‐wrote the songs. But just having that experienced person in the middle of the process to help guide and mentor the artist along is important to the success of the project. It's truly a team effort.” The result was a Grammy nomination.

The freelance nature of working on recording projects rewards recording, mixing, and mastering engineers and producers with the knack for getting things done. Jordan “DJ Swivel” Young has worked with some of the biggest recording artists in popular music. His rapid career trajectory from assistant engineer to mixing engineer to producer and entrepreneur is due in part to his organizational and collaboration skills. “I am fairly organized. I spend a lot of time staying on top of things. I just work really hard.”

“Making it happen” is a phrase Swivel uses when talking about key members of an artist's team who can step out beyond their role of recording or mixing engineer.

Swivel's ability to manage a process was critical for a rising band that brought him in initially in the role of co‐producer, to act as a sounding board as the group recorded its first album. They were working under a set deadline. The band had to be ready for their concert tour, where the album was a part of the ticket price. Swivel effectively took on the role of A&R, shepherding the album through the final stages of mastering and preparing for release.

Make Room for Artistic Brilliance

Music projects provide clear lessons on leading the creative process as they embrace the tension between their art and limited budget and schedule.

Egerton explains the importance of trust within the team. “Much of the process in this industry is about relationships and it's about the necessity or the need to solve problems that arise. There's the business side and the creative side. And it's like oil and water. The creative side typically doesn't want to deal with the business side and the business side doesn't typically understand the nuances associated with the creative. It is essential to let creativity organically happen amongst great talented people in a collaborative setting. As an A&R guy, my job is to get the best possible project done on time and on budget. So, I have to have the trust of the artist so they don't feel that pressure to the point that it ruins the creative environment.”

For lessons on managing the creative process, Feist draws on his career in software and in music. “In any endeavor where you're trying to be innovative, you have to see that the creative process needs some space to stretch its legs and walk around. And that's something that you sometimes have to fight for. You have to protect the spark of human ingenuity. You have to allow for the human spirit.”

Project Management Behind the Scenes

Feist sums it up this way: “Good project management is critical in making musical endeavors successful. But it often doesn't look like project management as applied in corporate settings.”

Using a Replicable Process to Manage the Project and to Develop the Product

Michael Leser stated, “Start your process guides at a high level and allow the user to add more details when needed.”⁸ The Fusion PM Methodology created by Frederick does just that and it serves the purpose of every good development process: it creates a common vocabulary for all project stakeholders and a common framework for viewing every project within the organization (see Figure 14.2).

Frederick emphasizes that the Fusion PM Methodology integrates the lean, waterfall, and agile processes. It is designed to improve efficiency and consistency to minimize waste and maximize value (Lean). It can be modified, scaled, and applied to any M.E.T.A. project. For example, the illustration in Figure 14.2 starts with a linear and structured approach (waterfall/predictive) from the Define to the Design phase. Then it switches to an iterative and incremental approach (agile) to iterate between the Design, Develop, and Detect (Test) phases. Finally, it switches back to a linear method from the Deliver to the Debrief and Determine (Evaluate) phases. The Fusion PM Methodology's phase titles and the EPD Life Cycle's phase titles are the same to promote consistency and clarity.

Fusion can be enhanced by adding a Kanban board to visualize task progression, as shown in Figure 14.2. New teammates could be onboarded more quickly by customizing the project management and the product development processes with the Fusion PM Methodology. For example, a new animator could work with an integrative team on a film or game project and understand the varied phases and processes better. Students using this methodology find that it can reduce common communication and collaboration gaps.