Agile Film Production

I come from a software engineering background into filmmaking. In engineering companies, teams constantly try to improve their process. Most of my recent teams have used an agile process to develop the product.

In agile, the product is constantly iterated on. Big features are broken down into smaller tasks that can be accomplished in a sprint, typically a two week period. Team members pick these smaller tasks when they become free and execute on them. The secret sauce of agile is the iterations and the smaller size of the tasks. The obsessive breaking down of bigger problems encourages team collaboration.

I’ve been experimenting with this process for making short films. This is actually more realistic than a full time production schedule given that most indie filmmakers these days have day jobs. Let’s call this incremental filmmaking, where a piece of the film is produced each week (sprint). This process is nothing new. Chris Nolan made Following, his first feature by shooting on Saturdays.

As you can imagine or perhaps experienced yourself, continuity becomes an issue. Although it can be mitigated by careful planning between production days, e.g. actors having the same costume and haircut.

In addition to producing the film incrementally, I am also intrigued by publishing the work gradually. So for our last short film, we have published episodes of the full film each week. With each episode running for less than two minutes, the challenge is to have each episode be self contained and not heavily depend on other episodes. This has been my main challenge in writing for an incremental production and publishing.

I am curious to hear about your experience with incremental filmmaking. You can watch the episodes we made for The Rent in our Youtube channel.

The Rent Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6p3FQ4oMHs

The Rent Episode 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRr5hLBEynI

I am curious to hear your experience around production scheduling for short and longer form films.