Friday, April 15, 2005

More on How Making a Studio Movie is Like Software Development Watching Project Greenlight the parallels between movie making in the studio system and corporate software development keep popping out. For those of you not watching Project Greenlight, it chronicles the making of a movie from script selection through a contest to picking the team to the making of the movie. The parallels between the studio system for making movies and the "studio" system for producing software are amazing. The director is saying stuff like "how can we know the shot until we see the scene?" The director of photography is pissed about every change. Team work and personal issues come to dominate the whole process. All the actors want to be told exactly what to do and when to do it. You have to make your daily shots or the world ends. And a week or so later you look at a rough cut of what you shot and then you are hosed when you don't like it. All the management types are running around having angst-filled meetings about how everything is off-track and unplanned and the budget shot and they'll never make the schedule. All along the director never really got to do things the way he wanted and even when they get to the shooting of the movie the whole infrastructure and momentum of the movie is just about getting the shot done and moving on to the next shot. The measure of success is not making any changes to what someone decided ages ago in pre-production so the daily schedule can be made. The director wants to explore a little and gets nothing but grief for his efforts. What the actors and the crew seem to admire is a director that knows exactly what they want to do all the time and can tell exactly what to do. I never realized before how similar software was to movie making and how the role of director is much like a software developer. Only in software every programmer is a director. comment[] 12:33:12 PM

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