From Vision to Reality

When we think of movies, we often remember how it made us feel, the locations, the actors and the maybe even the box office impact it had. Since watching and reading about the making of Ponniyin Selvan - the recent Mani Ratnam magnum opus based on a novel of the same name, I have been interesting in understanding the movie making process. More interestingly, I wanted to understand how a director is successfully able to deliver a movie within the acceptable budget, time frame and resources. Given the scale of movies like #StarWars, #Titanic, #RRR, #PonniyinSelvan or any of the #Marvel movies, it would take a huge crew with appropriate skills to get the job done on time. Delays would no doubt be very expensive and everyone involved would do their best to avoid it. Here's my attempt to decode the mystical process of bring a director's vision to reality.

Before even one scene is shot, the amount of preparation that is done for the schedule of the entire movie is mind boggling. There are plenty of case studies on the internet that describes the scale of this activity and for movies like #Lordoftherings and #HarryPotter, the makeup and costume section is a entire project in itself. If you are a Harry Potter fan like me, you could visit the Warner Bros studios to actually see the behind the scenes planning and preparation artifacts like costumes, sets, special effect makeup and props used. Or you could read about the amazing forecasting and preplanning #marvelstudios does before it releases it #MCU timeline.

When we break it down, the movie making process is very similar to managing software projects and there are some commonalities like starting with a clear #vision (what to do), script (backlog), a good team with clear roles and #responsibilities, schedule (project/product plan), #changemanagement, #riskmanagement and #stakeholders who control time and cost, among other things.

Just like in building a software application or product, the film making process also involves people of various skillsets coming together to create the end product. As a first step, in order to bring a story/script to life, the director being the #visionary needs to #communicate their ideas to the producers or the investors. The director would need to infuse #creativity, #innovation and #passion to convey their vision and this is extremely important because a clear understanding of what is being made will enable the people involved to understand what is expected and get fully onboard the process. This, I guess would be the hardest part of the process like with software startups.

Once idea is onboarded, the planning starts where the actors are cast, crew members are hired, budgets set, locations finalized and schedule drawn out. All this is a huge detail oriented process and definitely have a #capable and #skilled team to execute would be needed. This pre-production phase would involve a lot of #decisionmaking, #delegation, #feedback, #workshops and the entire team would need to bring their best #organizationalskills to make the detailed schedule. Whether it is the director heading this activity or some other team member, whoever does it would need to have good #leadership style and pay attention to detail.

The production phase of a movie would be much quicker and smoother if the #planning phase was done well like in software management process. Again this phase comes with its own set of #challenges that the director and team would need to navigate to get to the end #goal. The team would need to prepare for everything from actors falling sick, shoots being cancelled, location being unavailable due to weather to crew falling sick. So the operations handling part of film making is quite #complex and cost of delay here will be huge.

Then comes the post production phase which usually is longer than the actual filming. This phase would involve the processing of the footage shot for editing, adding of VFX, sound and dialogues, subtitling, etc and a #continuousimprovement process from #feedback loops with the creative team. Depending on the type of movie, the cost involved in the phase will vary as the tools used would be different. And finally comes the distribution and marketing for the movie, which is the last piece of work before the movie is turned to reality.

Another interesting fact to note here is the sheer scale of people involved in one movie is huge and the average as per Google is 588 and Iron Man 3 is credited with the largest crew of 3310. Interestingly, while older films had more extras, newer films have a big chunk of people in the visual effects department. And needless to say, when such large number of people are involved, its obvious that #peoplemanagement is also an invisible but essential part of the movie making process.

In conclusion, making a movie is much like software project management at large scale and there are multiple case studies on the internet which details out the various project management techniques and tools used in film making and make for an interesting read.