By Apoorva Gupta, Business Analyst, Zoho
The controversy surrounding Udta Punjab has brought to focus the question of what film-making is, and how censorship works. While this is an important discussion, the detail that caught our attention was related to the logistics of releasing a movie in India. After the movie is made, the Central Board of Film Certification examines the movie to certify it for public screenings. Most films are sent to be certified a week before release. What happens when at the last minute, the movie does not make it past the Censor Board? How many times have we heard of members of the cast, crew or production house falling out, movies going over-budget, or worse, becoming irrelevant or out of touch with the mood of the moment, because they took so long? How do we introduce transparency to film-production and certification?
One way there can be a shift in the way we think of cinema and movie-making is to learn from software-development. Films and software development have more in common that we might imagine. They are both creative crafts which require collaboration perhaps more than any other industry. There are no set “moulds” for production of each, they can both vary endlessly as far as audience, scale or even budget or style are concerned. So, is there a way film-production can learn from the way the software development world has changed?
Meet Agile. While a lot has been said and written about it, the philosophy behind Agile is fairly comprehensive – openness to constant change takes precedence over sticking to a plan; empowered teams lead to better solutions; and transparency makes things happen, as says the Agile Manifesto that 17 software developers came up with in 2001.
How does this work? More importantly, why have companies like Google, Apple, Yahoo, Spotify, and Facebook turned agile? The fundamentals are simple – to take on a creative opportunity, the company empowers a small, cross-functional team. This team manages itself and holds itself accountable. Tasks are broken down into smaller tasks based on priority. The team members then decide how much work they will take on and how they will reach their end-goal. Then they will start building actual working version of the product – not just documentation, in short cycles. The product is reviewed constantly and openness to change becomes important.
There might be a process-facilitator who ensures that any roadblocks that the team faces are removed. Disagreements are resolved through feedback and experimentation, rather than through hierarchial micro-management, something the film-industry is seemingly vying for after the Udta Punjab debacle. The process becomes entirely transparent. Small working prototypes are constantly tested, and the customer is a key stakeholder in all of this.
The benefits of this approach have been studied quite widely. Team productivity and employee satisfaction increases. Resources wasted on ineffective multiple meetings, planning and redundant documentation and low-priority features decreases. As the customers are at the center of Agile, their changing priorities are met and the most valuable and relevant products and features are brought to market faster. Agile means projects stay under budget and on-time.
But how does this carry to film-production? Or even resolve the censorship delays and changes? The essence of Agile is building a product over several small increments each of which can be reviewed by all stakeholders. If this is adapted and applied to film-making, it can ensure that a producer is not left with a complete movie rejected by the Censor Board. The short production cycles mean he does not wait for production to be over before taking it to be certified. Practices of classification by the Board too can become visible and not just arbitrary. It might even allow the Board to understand context and what goes into the making of a film, rather than stay at a distance and judge the final product. But this philosophy goes much beyond this.
Agile’s focus on collaboration is most suited to the need for communication among the multiple creative disciplines of movie production. This means that the teams will be empowered to be responsible for the end product- not just taking instructions from the producers and directors. Continuous improvement which would emphasize test screenings and keeping the audience in focus. The movie therefore won’t be tone-deaf. The story must connect with the audience at its core – and this does not get lost through hand-offs from writers to producers to directors. It could allow collaborative cinema to emerge properly. As barriers of production house hierarchies breaking down, indie filmmakers with smaller budgets could also compete.
The idea is here – how will the movie industry reimagine this?