What terrible movies teach us about leadership and change management

Additional reporting for this article by Gina Clover.

Have you ever seen a movie and wondered how they made such a terrible movie? If you saw it in theaters, it could have cost tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of people worked on it. there is. Someone must have known this was a bad movie. right?

If you’ve had that thought process, you’re not alone. many knew. But by the time it was too late, it was too late.

The problem is not in talent or taste. The hundreds of cognitively diverse people that typically make up a film crew come together with varying skills to create something bigger than them all. An example.

When a probable creative process goes disastrously bad, talent isn’t usually the problem. In many cases, it is the waterfall process that leaves each skilled team her members powerless to improve the final product.

As a friend of mine (film producer and former president of Amazon Films, Ted Hope) recently put it in his excellent substack, “Everybody wants it all. [took] Having a movie is a ‘good idea’ and a ‘good filmmaker’, but it actually requires a good process. And we don’t have them now. ”

This problem is not unique to Hollywood. The underlying problem is the same reason companies full of talented people often get mediocre results despite a lot of hard work.

Visual effects artist Felix Jorge had this in mind when he launched his digital studio Happy Mushroom. Jorge was frustrated to see great works of art like his (which could be done very early in the filmmaking process) often thrown away.

It comes down to coordination issues that aren’t resolved early on, Jorge says. “It has to do with the fact that the first man thought he was doing something. has been reworked.”

Lack of Coordination Creates Confusion

It’s like cooking a complicated dish. Your job is to prepare the ingredients used by the chef.

Let’s say the chef takes the ingredients and at that moment decides he wants to do something a little different with the recipe.something that promises to be Better than originally planned. She combines the ingredients and so far so good. Adaptation! innovation! Haza!

But let’s say it’s someone else’s job to actually cook what the chef has prepared. The cook looks at the original recipe, checks what the chef has handed him, and decides how best to make this dish at that moment. With no more real recipes to follow, cooks do their best.

Now let’s say someone else’s job is to take what’s been cooked and put together a meal. They have the original recipe, but the one pulled out of the pan is something else.

After this, the chef panics when he sees the results. They either freak out like Gordon Ramsay or ask the assembler to change. The cook also stops by and asks for change.

At some point, the person paying for this meal may call an emergency meeting. So the chefs, the cooks, the assemblers, the ingredients prep people all gather in the same room and stop coming and going. No one leaves until we agree on what to do next. However, at this point there is little opportunity to save food.

When a movie goes well (or a large team project at work), it’s a feature where there is good coordination and communication at every step of the process, even when the original plans change along the way. When the results are terrible, it’s often due to variations on this cooking analogy.

“It makes sense,” says Jorge. But suddenly he had a frankly mediocre job. ”

In the culinary analogy, an artist like Jorge is someone who prepares ingredients using a script (recipe) as a guide. Production designers use these materials to create movie sets for directors to shoot. The director has the cinematographer capture the action. All this “cooking” is taken out of the oven by our editors, who figure out how to turn it into a meal.

The obvious solution to this problem is to hash the disagreement and go to the same page before the cooking work begins.If we can bring all those parties into the process early together— even before doing their specific job — groups can hash changes to recipes and make adjustments Before Chopping and mixing and cooking begins.

The problem is that it’s hard to convince busy people to take the time to get involved long before the work is done.

“If you can grasp the director’s intentions, DP [director of photography]and production designer [up front]it’s much harder to tell me that my projects and what I do are disposable,” says Jorge.

But directors, DPs and production designers are busy. If your job is to cook meals all day, it’s hard to pull you away to talk about or be interested in preparing ingredients.

Also this method Everyone Cook. It’s hard to wean people from the best practices that the entire industry has been using for years.

Jorge’s big breakthrough with Happy Mushroom is that new tools and technologies can be used to “trick” people into getting involved early.

For example, in the emerging field of virtual production in filmmaking (which my current company, SHOWRUNNER, is working on), exciting new tools are expanding the possibilities for how movies are made. Instead of sending crews to remote locations, virtual production allows filmmakers to place gorgeous locations on giant LED walls. Just being in the studio can make it look like you’re in the jungle, for example. .

Directors, production designers, and DPs who are excited about this new technology will just have to learn new ways of working. It’s a great opportunity to make positive changes to established processes.

To do that, Jorge says it helps to address creative disagreements early on with tools that engage downstream collaborators—in his case, production designers.

Visualization artists like Jorge (ingredients prep, if you likened to cooking) aren’t the most powerful actors in the filmmaking process, but they (in Jorge’s words) have influence over the downstream process. You can “trick” it into weighing. People are naturally interested in new technology, so Jorge advocates using it as a hook to draw the attention of downstream collaborators to previous work.

I recently put this advice into practice on my own film project. During the first few months of the project, we had an editorial and post-production contractor (Prysm Chicago) involved in the planning process before we were typically involved. They were particularly interested in the new tools we were planning to use, so they naturally transitioned into collaborative creative discussions much earlier than usual.

“If [all collaborators] We’ll look at things as soon as possible and eventually come to a stronger product,” Jorge says.

The details of how to do this vary greatly between industries and companies, but the principles are: Trying to clarify disagreements early can help the team align itself early and prevent the team from being overwhelmed later. .

“I’m really looking forward to the future,” says Jorge. [and then succeeding]and for people to start thinking about future processes.” These new technologies will help filmmakers avoid the culinary problems of the past.

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Shane Snow is the author, Storytelling and Teamwork Keynote Speakerand CEO of a motion picture technology company show runner.