Movie Production
I recently had a very interesting discussion with Antti Sipilä, a producer from Luoda Production Oy. As he is a professionally trained movie producer, and I’m myself coming from the software industry, we were comparing the similarities between these industries. The question was, can the software industry learn something from the way movies always have been produced?
The first question is why should we even discuss this matter, what’s wrong with the software industry anyway?
Not necessarily anything. There are few interesting issues here, however:
- Do we utilize a model where we can get the best possible resources for each production (software project) we do?
- Do we respect and motivate the individual talents needed for a production… a project, to achieve best possible results in the given timeline?
- Why doesn’t the software industry respect deadlines?
Let’s start by describing the way how the movie industry works.
The first group in our focus is called the scriptwriters. This profession is specializing in writing the scripts, the actual idea of the whole thing. Sometimes the script is based on a book, sometimes not. You can think about these guys as the ones who write Business Plans in the software industry, in a way. The scriptwriters themselves do not go after each script on their own, in order to produce a movie, but they sell it to somebody. There are specialized agents shopping for these scripts. The buyers typically pay few hundreds of thousands of dollars for a good script. The buyers then develop these scripts further, and it can take years before a script goes further, if at all. Sometimes the scripts are even combined in order to create one better script.
When a script is ready for the next step, it is sold to a Movie Studio. It’s the factory that will produce the movie. One team can produce about 20 movies per year, taking care of the production and marketing alike.
Producing the movie needs talents, many different kinds of talent. And the talent set required for a movie can be each time different. The studios do not actually keep all the possible talents on the payroll, nor utilize only the talents they have on their payroll. They hire the actors and all the other talents and skills (such as light expertise) on a per project basis. There are specialized Casting Companies who find and contract these talents. Many famous movie stars have their own agents who take care of this process on their behalf.
The movie production can start when
- The script is in the shape it can be turned into a movie
- There is a movie studio producing it
- There are all the actors needed to implement it
- The studio has arranged financing for the movie, which could be done also with crowdfunding model
Each movie production is (or should be) a master piece of project management. As each actor and other resources needed cost money all the time, all the steps are well planned and go in parallel, including marketing and distribution. If there are unexpected changes, as there always are (like rain for a scene meant to be sunny), changes are done on the fly to keep the train going. Deadlines are respected, this is built-in feature of the industry. If some person will not do her task in the deadline agreed, she will not be respected by the others. Actually, nobody really wants to be the one who caused the delay of the production, and that also motivates everybody. Being will prepared for one’s role is always part of the success, and people take this seriously. The Crew Commitment is important!
On the other hand, the timelines (often defined by the Assistant Director) must be realistic in the first place, which takes experience to master. We discussed this long time with Mr. Sipilä and it was obvious that the respect of the deadlines, intensity of team work and mutual trust and respect are the core values for any successful movie production. Individual talents are, as we all know, respected highly and this is indicated for example by showing a long list of them at the end of movie. It’s like the Hall of Fame, and you want to be there.
As the movie industry is “hit driven”, the success or failure can often be measured for example by the sales of the first weekend. There is of course a long tail and other longer term revenues, but this first weekend often gives indication how it will go. The marketing and distribution actions are well planned and executed, nowadays utilizing many different media channels, like the Internet and mobile phones In order to control this the movie studios often own the delivery channels (like movie theaters and ticket offices) in many countries.
So what can we learn about this concerning the software industry? That will be covered next week, stay tuned!
… and comments are very welcome, thanks!
I don’t think the Software Industry is comparable to the Movie Industry, especially from the perspective of Project Management. The movie industry is much more mature (over a hundred years old now), the requirements are much more clearer (vs the vague and changing requirements in software projects, AND the clients rarely knows what s/he wants), the budget is rarely exceeded, and the delays are usually in weeks, months, but never in years.
PS: I published a huge set of articles on requirements management, and if you read a few from the list, you’ll notice that most of them are targeted at the Software Industry.
I have to say that, from a Project Management perspective, with little exceptions, the software industry has nothing to learn from any other industry.
Actually, how I see this is that there is a point but the problem is not the project management. As you said, it’s the requirements. The actual question is why is the requirement process so badly managed in the software business? That of course has a correlation to budget and delays!
I would agree with PM Hut and add that the tools used in software industry change much faster than in movie industry.
Change of tools lead to situation where the “cast” cannot really estimate the time it takes to develop with newish tools. It could possibly be compared to movie industry when e.g. editing the film changed from cutting the film to editing the film on a PC – I would bet that the people doing the editing could not estimate how long editing will take as they had never edited a movie with PC but with scissors.
I’m a programmer myself working in the computer games industry and I think this article has a solid point.
The movie industry is constantly reinventing itself. Companies such as Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Weta Digital etc. are constantly playing with new tools and new techniques. For example I’d imagine that estimating the time required to create necessary scenes for “Gollum” or other CG scenes in Lord of the Rings was not in the domain of well known problems at the time the movie schedules were made.
The tools used in the software industry are changing constantly, that is true, but the change isn’t really as drastic as software people like to think. Most of the programming languages have been around for a while (e.g. C++ has been used for more than 20 years), IDEs have basically the same features as they’ve had for years and so forth.
During my career I’ve noticed that experienced programmers can pretty well estimate the time required to complete a feature, do a bug fix or other task related to what they do. Experienced programmers also seem to have the ability to learn new tools pretty quickly and they are usually quite capable of estimating how complicated and suitable e.g. a new API is by studying it for a day or two.
It’s not uncommon for software sales people to sell products that are not complete or lack features, nor is it uncommon for project managers to make schedules for projects without fully understanding the requirements. Programmers are typically unwilling (or unable) to give workload estimates and their managers don’t always (fully) understand what the coders are working on a daily basis. The industry has a strong culture that accepts delays schedules and bugs in products. On top of this people working in the software industry seem to have a good ability to mystify the process of creating their products. Quite frankly it’s not magic.
Most of the time companies who fail to stay on schedule or fail to deliver just lack the skills and expertise that the project requires. If a programmers can’t estimate the time required to complete a feature or managers can’t cope with unexpected changes it just might be that they aren’t the right people for the job.
I’ve worked in and with a few company that relished their ability to stay on schedule and to deliver everything that has been agreed on. Not surprisingly these particular companies are also highly successful. I’ve also worked in a with companies who can’t manage this and typically they are not that successful…but naturally there are countless examples that can be used to contradict this.
The point I’m making is that on a high level the software industry is not that special. We need to learn from other disciplines and reinvent ourselves constantly. For this purpose I find these types of articles quite interesting.
[…] week I blogged about comparing the movie industry and the software industry. The feedback given in the comments […]