EA case study - Business activities and roles
The next step is to describe business activities for the prioritized business events (and needed business services) together with some of the roles. The benefit us that we can re-use a lot from industry standards and best practices in this area.
Post-production (narrative & non-narrative and non broadcast)
If we look at the business activities in Post production (non broadcast) are they very standardized.
Ingest
Story edit / off-line edit
Finalizing / on-line edit
Mastering
Output
The things that differ, is if your production have need for music, sound effects, graphics, visual effects, color correction and sub-titles. If those cases, much more to do during Finalizing / on-line edit but the process is the same.
Going back to our Business Events, these Business Activities works for corporate videos, commercials and feature films, but not for broadcasting a live event.
The Roles in film production is defined by guilds in US as the unions have a big influence in Hollywood productions. This is why use roles definitions from Directors guild in US and from Teaterförbundet in Sweden as a baseline for all role descriptions. See example below. (We will not list them all)
A. Director
C. Production Manager
2D. Graphic artist / Illustrator
5C. Editor
5F. Dialoge editor
18C. Sound assistant
For each Business Activity you need to describe the Roles. The longer, more complex film with bigger budget, the more roles are often needed in a production.
Development (narrative)
The Development part for a narrative filmproduction is from a process perspective very simple. You have three Business Activities as a best practice and we have added one additional Business Activity as an early step.
Story development
Screenwriting
Marketing strategy
Financing
Screenwriting, Financing and Markering strategy call all run in parallell after you have done the main part of the story development.
A rule of thumb is that one minute of film require one page of manuscript. For 30s comnercial, the script is only a page or two. For a feature film, the script is north of 75 pages. In both cases we you need a manuscript.
The role definitions are also standardised for this phase, and as a script have copyright, it’s very important to be clear on roles and responsibilities.
Pre-production (narrative)
Pre-production for narratives is often the root-cause for problems later on in the process, or rather lack of a proper pre-production.
This is the area were we have concentrated our efforts in business development for narrative films productions, and we had a working proof-of concept of the process in a film production this summer.
The activities we have for narratives are
Script breakdown
Locations
Crew, cast and extras
Plan shots
Production design
Technical equipment
In addition to those activities related to film production, we need project management activities and many more activities from other capabilities in the company. This is also we still make modifications to the process based on experiences from actual feature films and short films.
From an EA viewpoint, this is when we introduce Business Objects into our model. E.g. people in front of the camera and physical things we need in a film production as set design, props, wardrobe, cameras, light, grip, sound etc. They are the physical objects needed to be hired, rented and/or bought and available on time and in the right location.
Production (non live and non-broadcast)
This is when we film on set, either in a studio or on location and what’s happening is the plan from pre-production.
We wait with this part until we write about the information architecture and how manage GDPR & Design for privacy.
Distribution
The process is yet described on a detailed level or implemented. As we now are in post-production for our first feature film is this something we have to find out soon.