A Solution Driven Approach to Film Production

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Any time you start a new film project an important question to ask yourself is: 

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What is Your Desired Effect? 

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Truly. Ask yourself this question and define that desired effect for yourself. If your vision is incredibly ambitious, it's good to know early.

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Making the Impossible Possible

It's good to be honest with yourself and your team about the level of results you are looking for to best tell your story.

No matter the idea you have, if it comes from a place of creativity and honest expression there will be unique obstacles to tackle.

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The first time you realize the scope of your obstacle is a scary moment. Suddenly you are propelled so much closer to making your vision come true than you might realize.

When I personally realized that Syntactic Labyrinths wasn't going to be a walk in the park, but a multi-year marathon, I had a few restless nights to get my mind fully aligned with what I was embarking on.

Most creators unfortunately don't become aware of the obstacles they have to tackle early enough.

Remember, be uncompromising of your vision at this stage. You don't know yet how complicated this obstacle is to tackle.

No need to start giving up just yet :) 

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Once you have assembled council and advice from a team that is Solution Driven (often a combination of strategic thinking and creative collaboration) you will see something new.

The obstacle you identified is revealing itself to be made up of a variety of smaller and bigger obstacles.

You have a layered problem.

At this stage, you and your team might start feeling overwhelmed with the reality of the obstacles you will have to face. The good thing however, is that now it becomes a checklist.

This is the best position you can be in. You are aware of the nature of your problem. Now it's time to find solutions! 

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The next step is applying the solutions you have found — followed by iterating and iterating and iterating. An effective solution driven team understands that you most likely do not have an end-to-end solution.

Most likely you and your team are the middle component between two solution dependencies. One in front of you and one behind you.
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This is when it becomes important to dedicate Research & Development on each of the components of your layered problem.

Learn about the industries that overlap in having this same problem.

Together you are stronger than you would be alone, and if you both share the same problem, you already have lots to bond over!

For lots of complicated problems it's good to set up strategic partnerships. I'll make another post dedicated to building partnerships as it's a whole beast of a topic.
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But the moral is about finding mutual value between you and your partner. What are you working on that will fundamentally be of value to you and to them? And what do they already have that you don't, that you could implement into your current solution to make it that much better? 

Finally, if you want to have your solutions develop faster and outside of your control, I'd highly suggest you to consider open-source. Blauw Films is built on open-source and we wouldn't have had solutions to many film production problems if it wasn't a collaborative effort by an international community.

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An Example

For Syntactic Labyrinths we needed to create a photo-realistic planet Earth shot.
The obstacle: We don't have a photo-realistic planet Earth for the film.
The layered problem: We don't have high-fidelity texture maps, we don't have working shaders for the atmosphere, we don't have the computing power.
Strategic partnerships: NASA, Chaos Corona, Rebusfarm, IBM
Open solution: Earth Digital

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Conclusion

Film production consists of applying a problem-solving state of mind to progressively more complicated challenges. With the use of strategic thinking, patience and expert partners you can break down any given challenge into its layered problem. Then you're in for an adventure! 

By solving every problem that makes up your total problem you will have created a solution that drastically improves the end-result of your project :) Good luck!