Big week. I think. It's hard to tell, can barely remember it. I got wiped out by the flu on Thursday afternoon through til Saturday, but beginning to turn the corner on it now (Sunday). But here's what I can recall of the week... (in no particular order, other than the order I remember it in).
Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.
What were those meetings about? Mostly about meetings: the need for meetings, the running of meetings, the frequency of meetings, who needs to be involved in the meetings, rescheduling meetings.
Speaking of meetings... we had a nice meeting with the Co-Founder of Pledge-me, Anna Guenther. She was in Invercargill catching up with some people who have had successful Pledge-me campaigns in the area and dropped in to give us some advice. Really useful stuff that we'll take into our crowdfunding campaign for the games trailer. We should be getting that up and running soon. I think her most important points were really about making your crowdfunding campaign personal and take people on a journey - giving updates on where you're at, selling your vision, having interesting rewards that are not always physical items (e.g. having 'indirect rewards' - she gave us an example of one campaign where the reward was having someone jump into a freezing lake shouting your name to camera). She has a TED talk here.
Coming out of some of those meetings we've knocked out a rough schedule that we can refine a bit more this week. We're also looking ahead to doing casting calls and auditions in the next few weeks, which means we need posters and promotional things up and running yesterday.
We've also had more script meetings. I'll have to be honest here - I would do things differently if given another chance.
We've all heard great things about democracy, but sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it does but it's an extremely slow and unwieldy process. Usually within that process and within the goal of pleasing everyone, you end up pleasing almost no one.
Our format this year has gone something like this:
- Brainstorm ideas in small groups
- Refine ideas down to a pitch within small groups
- Team vote on the two "best" pitches (and hope that the writer can connect with either or both ideas)
- Script team brainstorm ways of combining these idea's (somehow)
- Hope that something cohesive forms out of the mix
- Hope that the wider team get on board with the hybrid idea
That's one way of doing it, and I'm not saying it can't work, I just feel that it's probably not the best approach. It's slow, energy-sapping and extremely frustrating. Scriptwriting by comity is a hard slog.
However, hindsight is 20/20.
Possibly a more efficient way of doing it might have been:
- Brainstorm ideas in small groups
- Bring those idea's back to the writer as possible inspiration
- The writer goes away and writes X amount of pitches which may or may not have anything to do with the original ideas
- The team votes on their favourite one.
This way, you know that the writer is already has a connection with it. The writer more than anyone else in the team needs to connect with the idea. I think it's easier for the team to get on board with a well thought out story written by a good writer, than it is for a writer to get on board with two concepts that they may not connect with. In the same way that you don't want the painters voting on how a house should be built, I don't think you want the accountants voting on how a script should be written.
Hell, maybe there is no "easy" way of doing it, maybe it was always destined to be difficult.
Having said all that however, I think we do (miraculously) have an idea that we can proceed with and something the rest of the team will like.
And that's my current mission: writing a draft script, by tomorrow. Which means no more blogging tonight...
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