Impossible Filmmaking (Part 2)

Kevin Richardson is a motion picture development, games and story professional with feature films, TV series and games to his credit. You can follow him on Twitter @K_Richardson.

  Risk Management   Stakeholder Management   Using PMI Standards  

As I covered in Part 1, we were tasked with completing the story portion of pre-production. Pre-production is where you work out all the kinks and details with a small team. You want to blow up more cars to make the scene more impactful? Easy! Scribble more explosions on a storyboard panel and add a bigger sound effect in editorial. Viola! Strategically, preproduction is also when you sort out all of the “Gotchas!” before the budget is turned loose on hundreds of expensive artists, animators and technicians. It’s a good time to rein in complexity.

The PMP method also required that I know what kind of information the stakeholders wanted (and did not want) and how often to deliver it. I reported to the producer, who wanted daily morning check-ins and a report that described our progress against the schedule. For our stakeholders back home, such as spouses and children, we called or Skyped and sent pictures to show we were still alive, making sure the photos didn’t look like we were having too much fun or not eating enough.

Knowing the amount of work to be done and number of artists available to do it--and that I had no wiggle room--I set out to build a more detailed schedule. The goal was to storyboard the movie three times in five months. In parallel, I met with the team and the producer to gather and document all the thoughts and assumptions around…

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