Earlier this week I read a tip on The 99 Percent site, titled, The Beta Principle: Skip Perfection & Launch Early - the post made a strong argument for start-ups to avoid the drag of over-refining and take to advantage of early user-feedback. But, when reading, I couldn’t help but see how this “launch early” argument applied perfectly to filmmaking.
In the last few years, since running this production blog, I’ve talked many, many, many times to other filmmakers who want to wait till after they raise funds / after they cast actors / after they finalize the script / after they location scout / after they finish principle photography / after they finish their film’s first rough cut… all *before* worrying about a website.
There’s an impulse to get everything as close-to-perfect before putting it out there infront of people - now, I’m not making a case for releasing the roughest parts of your feature film, I wouldn’t know how to go about such a thing in a constructive way - but it’s important to put as much of your project out in the open as early as you can.
One point I found interesting in the post was this: “On a psychological level, a team thinks differently once the first version of a product is up and running. Rather than working for a hypothetical group of customers, everything you do affects real people. Your team will become more expedient and start to think of the project in smaller chunks rather than as an insurmountable giant.”
Amanda and I released the 1st five episodes relating to Pedal before many components of the film were “ready”. The episodes themselves are rough and are sometimes hard for me to watch without being overly critical. But they shifted the mindset we were working in dramatically.
There is no comparing the day-to-day urgency in working on a project with only yourself to answer to… only yourself to disappoint if you don’t come through on schedule - as opposed to being public about your project’s intentions, ambitions, and missteps. The difference would be similar to rehearsing a speech infront of the bathroom mirror and giving that same speech infront of a crowd of hundreds; everything changes.
Amanda and I have tried to sneak as much of the finished film, For Thousands of Miles, into the supporting episodes and stories (64 Days) as we could. Hitting on specific moods or story-telling styles which allowed us to see not only *how* people reacted but, more importantly, *what* they reacted to. This feedback has had a very strong affect on the film’s narrative - really in a way that I never would have expected.
I can look through each page of the script and find specific lines that have either found their way into - or remained in the script - because of a comment someone left on an episode, or because of an email we received that said a certain line from episode one meant something much larger to them personally.
I understand that in the earliest stages of planning; things will change greatly - but in launching your project early, in making public your ideas and goals; which specific things will change between planning and release will be guided in a much more constructive and rewarding way.
