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There are three days left for you to help our indie film team finish and release a feature film. Read this for how you can help! I would love it if you help by following that link and clicking 'follow' on the Seed&Spark campaign page. If we get 500 likes, we unlock a lot of great services to help us distribute the new film.

The concept of Longship, as I remember it, was triggered when Kristjan went to a film festival and heard about a filmmaker who shot a feature in a week. He saw the film, wasn't hugely impressed, and thought, "I can do better.".

When he approached me with the idea, he already had some talent excited about doing it, so we put our heads together and started structuring the plan. The result is a film called 'Second Honeymoon', which isn't a perfect film but is absolutely amazing when you consider how quickly it was made.

The easiest way to describe the Longship method is to compare it with traditional filmmaking approaches. Traditionally, a concept is made and pitched for funding, a script is written (usually multiple times), talent is searched to match the script, the script is then restructured into a shooting script, etc, etc, etc. It is a long and linear approach. In IT, we would call this the waterfall approach.

When crafting the Longship method, we instantly saw that it was very much in line with the "Lean Start-up" thinking that was en vogue at the time. This movement has gone mainstream in corporate life and now applied to everything under the title of "Agile." Essentially, the Longship method is Agile filmmaking.

The original Agile manifesto, made out of IT industry frustration back in 2000, has these as the core values: 1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, 2. Working software over comprehensive documentation, 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation, 4. Responding to change over following a plan.

Longship is very much bases on this energy, and has a lot of the same techniques at work.  The team shooting the film is a small (10-12) group of highly skilled and motivated people. It's a cross functional team. A lot of the bureaucracy has been removed in our 'rules of the game', for example there are no assistants. The script is developed to an absolute 'minimum viable product' level, meaning we have more of an outline, an idea of the characters matched to the talent, locations, some plot lines and maybe a bucket of dialogue. It is not a script as you would expect it to be.

With this, the team starts shooting the film in roughly chronological order when possible. This is important because the story call and will change direction along the way. We like to say, "We let the universe tell the story it wants, instead of forcing the universe into the story we want."

It is not a running or pressed process, it's not about working crazy hours. At the end of every day there is a processing discussion, and the writer and editor are involved the whole time to help craft and re-craft the story. It's sort of a daily standup, but without the board and open actions, etc. 

The biggest thing which is missing if you compare Agile development and Agile filmmaking is the lack of customer testing in the film world. We basically have one sprint to come up with something that the team think is good enough to provide an entertaining experience for the audience. Because the whole team has input into the story development, it is a pretty cross functional perspective, but no actual audience involved. Maybe in the future we'll figure that out.

My role as Producer is to help ensure the team actually gets to the shoot, meaning all the contracts are in place and the finances are consolidated at the end. Pretty much everybody pays their own way, so we keep the costs extremely low. We have a profit split arrangement to pay people back if and when the project makes money. 

The first run with this approach was 'Second Honeymoon', which I think is a great plot concept. You can watch it on Vimeo on Demand and other places online. Look at the lady in the poster on this post. The emotion you feel when looking at her is what you will feel while watching the film. If anyone from Hollywood is reading this, this story deserves to be made into a full feature, it is that creative and captivating. What happened during the shoot, was one of the actors was responding to the experience in an out-of-character way. What we were able to do is use this unusual behaviour and changed the genre into a thriller. 

After the first edit, we also realised that the 'pay off' shot at the end was very weak, and had to have a debate on whether to go back and re-shoot. In the end, also sticking to the model, Kristjan was able to do some magic with green screen, and it's good enough. Nobody seems to notice, and they enjoy the film, so job done!

The second film made with this was actually a failure based on our original concept. Originally titled 'Wisconsin Bound', this was shot in Wisconsin after the Flyway Film Festival where Kristjan won the 'Breakout Filmmaker' award for the Longship method. Unfortunately, after looking at the first edit of this film, it was absolutely beautiful, but it was only half a story. 

Hard discussions were had. Multiple team sessions and a lot of discussions. What to do?

Finally, the team concluded that the footage we had was worth it to continue, so we did another shoot (sprint) to make the other half of the film. Both of these together is now called 'Exposure'.  I can't wait to see the first edit when they get it put together in the next weeks. You can help make this film happen by clicking that link on the top of this story!

So far, we have proven that we can do the creative part of the filmmaking journey in a Agile way to create really unique and enjoyable films for a low financial investment.  

However, unless the film makes it to a paying audience, we will never be able to repay the team for their time and costs.  How to get our films to the world? We need some fresh new thinking, and that is for tomorrow...

You can start at the beginning of the story here.