Some late-night musings on production
Now that I’m rested and back in the game after finishing work on Bolas Chinas (actually, we are supposed to do a single scene on Wednesday, I think, but filming has officially wrapped), I’ve been thinking about what it is I like about being on set.
Even in small, low-budget, and not terribly organized productions like Bolas Chinas, there’s a strong sense of common purpose within the cast and crew. Everyone’s trying to get the damn thing done. It’s on the level of the best software development teams I’ve been on, and that’s part of what makes it so fun, I think. There’s also that smooth feeling of people doing their thing, efficiently and without fuss (of course, that’s not always, or even often, true, but it very often feels that way). And you develop a certain camraderie with everyone in the cast and crew. No matter what you think of their work as such (which can certainly vary), you have the same purpose, and you sympathize with each other. You eat, chat, sleep, and wait for hours together, and it’s pretty much impossible not to feel a little bit like a family.
Now that I think about it, that feeling of family has always been something I’ve looked for in the jobs I’ve had. I loved working at Helix Code/Ximian in the beginning, for instance, since we were just 30 people, and everyone talked and knew each other. Later, when the company got bigger and more corporate, it wasn’t that much fun any more.
I think management consultants and their ilk could learn a lot from looking at movie productions. But on the other hand, I think movie productions could also be modernized quite a bit. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s basically hold-overs from the old days, and is particularly obsolete on small, guerrilla productions.
Øyvind and I spent a lot of our waiting time talking about uses for computers in movie production. There could be a huge amount of stuff done there, for screenwriters, directors, DPs, production people, continuity/script assistants, and whatnot. What’s available today is pretty pathetic in terms of integration and user interface, and I say that as a registered Final Draft user. If free software wanted to completely take over a relatively small, but high profile niche market, that would be it. Open formats, free software, and heavy integration would be perfect for this stuff.
A good place to start would be a screenplay editor. It’s basically just a glorified text editor with some formatting macros, and could be written in a short time by a couple of decent programmers. It also has the advantage of beign very well-defined. Current screenwriting software is developing so little that there was no useful new features in Final Draft 7 as opposed to 6. So duplicate FD’s functionality, with a slightly better UI, an open XML-based file format, and a Final Draft import/export filter, and you’d be on your way. Add stuff like integration with a revision control server, version diffing, collaborative editing, and a few other things, and you’d own that market.
Update: I’ve written more detailed about screenwriting software requirements in a new post.
December 12th, 2005 at 7:03 pm
I work in film and television production and you are absolutely right. It’s a perfect niche for open source development. Professional post-production is well covered by a range of quality proprietary products like Avid, Smoke, Final Cut, Flame, Pro Tools, etc. But the software that writers, producers and production management use is almost universally not very good, outrageously overpriced, and poorly supported. And I say that not just as a paid-up user of Final Draft, but of a zillion other products, like Movie Magic / EP Budgeting, Movie Magic Scheduling, Point Zero, etc.
They all suck. And all could be implemented as “minor” variations of existing codebases. How different is Final Draft from Abiword or OO Writer? Point Zero (or any AICP-type budgeting software, used on most small productions and commercials) is based on Excel, but would work even better as a customized Gnumeric or OO Calc. Scheduling and AD-type software could be based on something like Planner. Location managers would kill for a photo manager that was more suited to their needs than iPhoto (built-in panoramic stitching, for example), and that sounds like a job for gThumb or F-spot. And so on. There’s a lot of work that would need to be done, but a lot of the infrastructure is already there. I could go on and on about software that would make various production work easier but either doesn’t exist but exists and sucks.
There’s even a good business potential here, because of the unique structure of the production market. At the low end there are a million people who need or want this software because they’re cranking out low-budget work, guerilla filmmaking, film school projects, writing The Great American Screenplay in their spare time, etc. Most of these people are using pirated versions of the above mentioned products or nothing at all, and most would welcome a free alternative. But at the high end, studios and production companies demand enterprise-level support – and are willing and able to pay for it. A movie studio depends on Final Draft or Movie Magic every bit as much as an enterprise depends on a server OS. A company that offered a suite of well-supported, well-integrated open source production software could become the Red Hat of the film industry overnight.
Key to the strategy would be Mac support. Macs dominate production (and are at least an equal player in post). You will often walk into a production office of 50 people and not find a single PC. I’m typing this an iBook I own for no other reason than the need to interoperate with others in my business. Imendio’s GTK port is a good start, I guess.
December 12th, 2005 at 9:30 pm
Hey, Bob.
I agree with pretty much everything you say here. I think code reuse would probably be best done through stuff that’s already in libraries, avoiding forks of existing code bases, to keep things neat, but that’s a technical detail. There’s a general tendency for useful code in free software to migrate to libraries anyway.
If you’re interested in further discussions of this, read the new post I added, at http://mexploitation.blogmexicano.com/2005/12/12/on-screenwriting-software/ and if you want, comment, or drop me a line at joakim at avmaria.com