Thursday, September 02, 2010

On making a short film...

On the surface, this blog post from Software by Rob on surviving the 'danger points' in running a startup business have absolutely nothing to do with making a personal short film. But if you replace a few key words ("startup" for "film" for example) I think there's a lot of solid advice involved. I say this because from my experience I've found that making a short film is in many respects very much like starting up a new company. Some good excerpts. First, on choosing an idea...

But if you tend to over-think your decisions, then choosing a product idea is going to take months…nay, years. That’s right – odds are high that by the time you figure out what you want to build you could have built and launched multiple products in the same time frame.

I'm definitely guilty of this. The goal is to get something done. I often get bogged down doubting if what I want to do is even worth doing. Classic over-thinking.
And on budgeting your workload...

The first way to combat this [problem] is to have a detailed feature list and an estimate for every task on that list. This list should include marketing tasks and anything else you need to get through your launch date. This list will be large; likely 80-120 lines long. With an estimate for each item you should be looking at 400-600 hourstotal. For everything. If you’re over 600 hours you need to cut something.

Anyhow, check it out. Might be handy.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

please include the link to the blog's post so that we may check it out

Keith Lango said...

oops! Formatting error. Fixed now.

Phil Willis said...

What a coincidence. I've been thinking the same thing.

As it turns out - I've been reading startup blogs like 37Signals, Startup Quote and Seth Godin.

http://37signals.com/svn/
http://startupquote.com/
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

From what I can tell, starting your own business has a lot in common with making your own short film.

Especially when it comes to selecting ideas, cutting out unnecessary "features", overcoming fear, embracing constraints and working to a deadline.

Lot's of great parallel lessons to be learned.

Michael Cawood said...

Thanks Keith. I actually found a lot of similarities between running a collaborative short film project and starting a business, and started learning about business start-ups a while ago. There's been a lot of relevent parralels.

I've noticed that my technique to many things is to alternate between shot gun approaches, and narrowing down and refining what works. So try lots of things, explore lots of ideas, then when you start to notice some working the the overall project needs more attention in key areas, I focus down on the things that are most needed. Between each phase I return to the big picture and prioritize what's needed.

Anyway, thanks for that post Keith.