Sunday, March 13, 2005

Project Greenlight is Like Software Development Project Greenlight is a program that covers directors pitching their films for funding and then following the film getting made. I got a serious sense of deja vu from watching the show. It was so like many software projects i have worked on. There was a lot of uncertainty about which project to fund. Nobody was quite sure which movie to pick. The guy who won was the guy who talked the best. A lot like software. The director who finally got funding was a little unsure now about how to deliver the film. A lot like software. The day after the project was greenlighted they went throught the script and decided the movie could only be done for about triple the original budget. A lot like software. Now here's where the parallels to software were amazing. It's in the horse trading about how to bring the project back under budget. The industries may seem very different but the process was oh so familiar. Can you do without that feature? Can you change this or that? I know the movie is set in Chicago in 1976 but can we move it to LA and set it in the present? An executive on a phone conference played the we-want-what-you-want-as-long-as-it's-under-budget card. The execs would say that they would love to have X in the movie as long as they could fit it in the budget. Classic. Just classic. That's reality though. Someone is putting up a lot of money. They have a right to expect certain things, especially if you told them what they should expect. Unfortunately a lot things can't be known until you actually try to do them. That doesn't make the precision planning people very happy. comment[] 9:02:20 PM

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