On Monday at SxSW I watched Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path discuss the 10 tips for managing in a creative environment. This post focuses only on two tips. Don’t worry, At the end of this, I will list the other eight tips for those of you who absolutely MUST look under the bandage.
What I love about the adaptive path research was how they took a cross disciplinary slice. They spent time studying diverse, creative groups including restaurants, theater troupes, and professional writers among others.
Tip #1: Actively turn the corner
This diagram is of the creative process:
The first half of creating anything involves a divergence of ideas. You start with a single idea and then everyone starts throwing in different ideas that diverge from the original. No idea is eliminated at this stage and often experiments and mini-models are created. Then you turn the corner. At some explicitly defined point, you stop taking in new ideas and start converging towards a single point by eliminating what is unnecessary. This reduces scope creep, release slippage and the dreaded moving target. Eliminated ideas aren’t trashed, simply put into a “future creation/release” bucket.
Tip #2: Kill your darlings
Eliminate the ideas you LOVE that don’t get you closer to the goal first. Don’t eliminate the low hanging fruit or easy choices first. Choose instead to go after eliminating the tough choices from the beginning. By biting the bullet and eliminating the difficult choices first, the low-hanging fruit (those ideas to which you are not attached) becomes easy.
The eight other tips: 3. Cross-train the entire team
4. Rotate leadership
5. Know your roles
6. Practice, practice practice
7. Make the mission explicit to the entire team
8. Leadership is a service
9. Generate the creative projects around the group’s interests
10. Remember the audience BONUS: Celebrate Failure (after all, it’s part of the creative process)
Back in the caveman days when we wanted a mate, we just beat them over the head with a large club. I know because I have seen countless reenactments on television. Occasionally, there was a ‘numbskull’ who, despite being struck with repeated blows, had no idea that the mating ritual had begun.
How would we reach these numbskulls? Not by beating harder. For these folks, we needed to guide them through the process with iterative, easy-to understand steps. (“ok, walk over to this rock. Good! Now just a little bit further to that bed of mammoth fur over there”)
{I hope this level of degradation pays well}
Many times in script development, the helicopter stunt sounds like a good idea until someone takes the club and hits everyone over the head with the price tag. Unfortunately, this usually happens at the end of the script development. After weeks or months of head nodding, a flurry of expense-induced head shaking breaks out. The result: wasted time and last minute rewriting.
What would be useful is a way to wed the story development and production planning/budget together. Some iterative steps that show everyone where the production is headed opposed to a heavy club at the end.
Does Market7 have such a thing? Well, no, not yet. I know you all saw some sort of self-serving marketing pitch coming on but this is a blog. It is composed of observations gleaned from talking to hundreds of producers. Occasionally, these things just hit ME over the head.
A treatment (sometimes called an approach, concept proposal, or conceptualization) is simply telling the story of the film/video in prose. It covers the core idea around how the video will look and sound.
Typically, the writer and/or director will create a few treatments for the client from which to decide upon. Once a treatment is chosen, the transformation of treatment to script begins.
Short and Sweet
The treatment is of limited length, not more than a paragraph. It’s much like a movie synopsis description you might read in the paper or on-line. It doesn’t contain every important detail and might even finish in an open question of how the story ends.
A change in treatment = starting from scratch
If a client changes his/her mind in the middle of a production and decides to go with a different treatment than agreed upon, it means basically starting over. Some clients don’t understand that changing the core idea affects production so profoundly. Producers, often worried about seeming inflexible, won’t explain this impact. As a result. Clients end up unhappy about late delivery or cost overruns and producers are frustrated by a stressful production.
The treatment is the foundation of your video. Everyone should understand that, though sometimes necessary, ripping apart the foundation affects the entire structure. In understanding this, you understand that giving extra care up front on the approach in the treatment will pay big dividends throughout production.
Boredom. It is what most viewers of your content will suffer from. As the enterprise, you put forth your money and as the producer you put forth your time and creative energy only to have the child of your collaboration end up in the ‘unwatched’ category.
Here are a few things you can do when writing your script:
Length (not too long):
1. 30 second advertisement (if the viewers don’t know your product or service).
2. 2-3 minute informational (if the audience has knowledge of the product or service and wants to know more).
3. 8-12 minute instructional (Only for specific teaching purposes).
Interest (Keep it compelling):
1. Focus on a specific topic, break broad topics up into multiple segments.
2. Find a way to connect emotionally with the audience.
3. Edit, edit, edit. Say the most with the fewest words.
4. Every good story has a beginning, middle and end. So should yours.
The script drives everything that relates to the story. With the WGA strike persisting and the corresponding lack of entertaining content (I have taken to watching reruns of ‘Seinfeld‘…George is sadly more like me than i care to admit), it’s plain to see the importance of a good script. A solid script leads to a solid production. Most unhappy customers and frustrated producers can point to the script where the problems began. It is the roadmap behind which all wagons follow.
With something so important, why is it so hard to lock a good script?
First, we tried to identify what makes up a good script. We found that for enterprise customer video, a good script must be three things:
Accurate (reflects the Client’s message)
Clearly understandable
Compelling
What keeps a script from becoming good?
Accuracysuffers when there is not effective communication between the client and the producer. Many times our producers think everything is fine until the day of production when the client complains that the message is off point. This often leads to a breakneck patch job to save the day.
Clarity suffers when the script isn’t reviewed by the right people who should have a say in the story. The dreaded ‘Huh?’ from those responsible for translated the script onto screen (such as the Director or the Marketing Communication Manager) is a death sentence for the production.
Compelling Interest is lost when the script becomes too long, difficult to follow, unfocused or offensive. This happens when too much information is shoved into the script for the audience to digest. Soon, the script is bulging at the seams with extraneous information. On the other hand, a story that starts uninteresting will stay that way when too few of the people who care about it (and who would say the story is not good) don’t read the script.
As a result of what we learned, we next started building a script editor that would break down and eliminate some of these problems by helping the right people review the right story at the right time to produce the best possible script.
Check out how we are trying to solve this problem…
{I hope this level of degradation pays well}
