Project Management for Filmmakers: Delegation

Delegation is distributing work in the right way among team members. It’s a leadership task that demands a steady, humble ego and good listening. It’s not enough just to give people work, you must listen to them. Learn their strengths and desires. Understand their current commitments and know what season they are in in their life. Some team members might be able to take on more work than others, or do certain kinds of work more effectively because of their strengths. This will help you delegate work effectively for your project. Delegating work appropriately makes your team members feel heard and understood. When your team members feel heard, they’ll show you what they are most excited about doing, thus making your job easier and giving everyone  better experience.

I hope to do a series on leadership in the future, but since we’re on the subject with delegation, I’ll talk about vulnerability for a second. As a leader, everything you do sends a message about expectations and limits. You are their example. Prove to them that you accommodate vulnerability and expect their strength: then they will give you their honesty. Team members will not try to deceive each other if there’s no reason to do so.

As an example, in the making of Delta Phi, the commitment levels were hugely uncertain. I was asking for long shoot days, weekly, over the course of nearly a year and with very little notice given my academic timeline. It also included weekly meetings and rehearsals that were hours long. But if someone was sick, if a few members were overloaded that week, or if the weather was bad, I cancelled. No questions and no debate. As far as I know, I had a better turnout for this project than I or any of my colleagues have had. Why? I pre-empted cancellations and flake-outs by showing my team members that I would accommodate conflict instead of seeing conflict as a threat to my success. People most often are absent from their responsibilities when they feel unsafe in them, when they feel like their leader or supervisor has no benchmark or standard for when enough is enough. When you show the people you work with that you don’t see humanity and mercy as a threat to your goals, they have the freedom to be honest about you about their real level of commitment. If a commitment doesn’t threaten people’s individual weaknesses, they’re more likely to stick to it.

This is important to delegation in the event that you are unsure about what to assign. You may find that instead of chasing people down, your team members feel empowered to come to you to tell you what they have to offer because they know you won’t take undue advantage of them.

This is the second in a four part series on project management. Come back next week to learn hacks and tricks for keeping everyone in your team on the same page. 

Project Management for Filmmakers: Margin

Whether I’m making a film or a novel or any other kind of long story, project management is key. I’ve learned a lot over the last several years about which aspects of project management are worth the investment and which are worth abandoning. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I’ve learned a thing or two about margin that is worth sharing today.

Like the hole-punched side of your binder paper, margin in a project is about having extra space. You have to have room for error. I’m often told that my projects are ambitious, but in truth, I try as much as I can to underestimate how much I’ll be able to do before my deadline. Then if there’s extra time deep into a project, I have a better perspective on how to use it than I would at the start of a project.

Margin isn’t just scheduling, though. It’s also about archiving and project security. In the case of video, project security is all about backups. If I think I’ll get 1 or 2 terabytes of footage, I get a 4 terabyte drive. I back everything up and I have a backup plan for the backup plan. I’m almost irrationally cautious about how I store, carry and use my hard drives. Every measure is worth it if it can protect me against losing just one aspect of the project. Other aspects of project security can include considerations of your resources. Know your priorities ahead of time so that if things don’t go as planned, you know what compromises you are willing to make and which things you simply can’t compromise. Be conscientious about where, when and with whom you share your ideas. This isn’t just important with film, when so many things are required for production. It’s important for writing, too, because even when you’re writing a novel, you’ll have to make difficult decisions about what your project is going to address and what things have to go to the wayside.

Archiving has more to do with having a good workflow and doing a favor for your future self. It’s easy to know what all the pieces in a project mean when you’re in the center of the work, but neglecting organization and archiving your ideas, records and progress is a major loss. A record of your project is, in itself, a potential piece in and of itself! There’s two stories to your project: the end result and the tools you used to make it. Keep your sketches, notes, and mind maps; and organize them for future study. How can you expect to write metafiction if you don’t respect the form of the process itself? Have a sense of pride and respect for the learning process as you go along, and don’t cast off old drafts in shame. Your future self will thank you; and who knows? Perhaps someday others will want to see what’s behind the finished result, and you’ll be ready with something to share.

This is the first in a four part series on project management. Come back next week to learn about delegation and vulnerability. 

Top 5 Resources for Writing to Character

Characters & Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing)

$12.37

By Orson Scott Card

This book is one of the most frequently cited texts in workshops and writing panels. The MICE quotient, Cinematic Third Person and many other methods writers use today were first introduced by Card in this book. While I personally don’t ascribe to all the methods, I love recommending it because it’s succinct and shares a lot of principles that are useful for scriptwriters.

Kicking In the Wall: A Year of Writing Exercises, Prompts, and Quotes to Help You Break Through Your Blocks and Reach Your Writing Goals

$12.57

By Barbara Abercrombie

Books of writing prompts are usually not good for much else other than warms ups and pure technical training. This one is special. The exercises are well thought out, and can be applied to your character’s experiences or your own. Either way, I find that they draw out fresh conflicts and details. They compel my characters to move.

Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction

By David Jauss

This book has the most eloquent explanations of conflict and point of view that I’ve come across. It’s directed more towards novelists than screenwriters, though. A good alternative for this if you are just just focused on screenwriting is Judith Weston’s The Film Director’s Intuition, which has a part on rehearsal techniques that can also provide a nuanced understanding of character perspective.

45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters, Revised Edition

$10.93

By Victoria Lynn Schmidt

For the most part, this book is exactly what it sounds like. It categorizes and describes character archetypes. Good for both writers and academics, but the real meat is in the back. She breaks down methods of change for characters (character arcs) and presents dichotomous solutions to well known character structures. (For example, the feminized version of the hero’s journey that we witness in The Wizard of Oz)

The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society

$7.43

By Carl G. Jung

Anything by Carl Jung is valuable, really. 

This guy breaks down symbols and the way that pervasive narratives represent and shape our inner conflicts as human beings. If you want to write human characters, this will fascinate you. Start with his theory of the anima/animus; it will give you a deeper understanding of what characters are to us and to each other.

I hope that those resources prove useful for you. If you’re looking for good examples of stories that characterize people sublimely and are easy to learn from, check out Inu-Yasha, Breaking Bad, the novels of Brandon Sanderson and anything by Jane Yolen. It’s also useful to examine multiple retellings of a classic story and witness how the characterization has changed across versions, as well as the traits that are preserved.