How being a Product Manager helped me release my First Film in less than 150 hrs.

45 hrs a week, I work as a Product Manager in a startup. Rest of the time, I make films. Making a successful film is all about having the conviction and perseverance to carry forward the vision of the story till its release, just like launching a successful product. Being a product guy has helped me immensely to attack filmmaking with a lean approach.

A good PM makes a better Filmmaker!

When Steve Wozniak in the 2015 film asked Steve Jobs, “What do you do? You’re not an engineer, you’re not a programmer, you can’t design anything. What do you actually do?”, he didn’t understand what Jobs brought to the table. He saw value in building things and he clearly couldn’t see Jobs build anything. But Steve Jobs did build things. He built a vision. He was one of the greatest product managers of all time.

Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra. — Steve Jobs (2015)

A filmmaker too is a dreamer, just like a product manager. Similar to a PM who manages the product strategy by tackling the ever-changing business needs and planning resources for release cycles, the filmmaker too drives various departments of the film towards a common vision by overcoming ups and downs in the journey, while keeping all the stakeholders happy.

“You could say that about movie directors, virtually all of us. I don’t write, I can’t act, I can’t fix a camera — I can’t do anything really, but you do what he (Steve Jobs) did, which is you synthesize the people who can towards a vision.”

— Danny Boyle, Oscar winning filmmaker

When I started making my first film, I had no clue about the film production workflow used in the industry. So I put into practice, the product workflow that I was familiar with in my day job.

Back to my story…

If you don’t already know how I got started, read my previous article here:

Becoming the zero budget DIY Filmmaker — M S N Karthik — Medium_Precisely an year ago, in the early monsoon months of 2016, I got my calling. A calling from my future self. He asked…_medium.com

Now that I’ve setup my DIY camera gear and successfully launched my own YouTube channel, it was time for me to explore some outdoor filming. My passion for travel and filmmaking logically pointed me to pursue Travel Documentaries.

I started searching for interesting places in Eastern India, as I had plans to visit my family in Kolkata. This exploration introduced me to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which attracted around 2 million people each year from all around the globe. Roughly about 2600 years ago, the journey of a Prince from Nepal to this place has resulted in the birth of the Buddha. The place is called Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha got enlightened under a peepal tree. For a person wanting to explore his inner peace, what better place could there be to launch his filmmaking career from?

The Buddha Statue, Bodh Gaya

Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.

The most principal thing in the film life cycle is planning. Similar to product roadmaps, a Film Production Plan gives the filmmakers a clear sketch of the pre-production, production and post-production timelines, and helps them stay focused on the end goal.

Especially for a person like me, with the day job on, it’s very easy to lose track of the vision as I only had time after office hours and on weekends to work on the film. Hence it was important for me to etch a clearly defined film plan, set a launch date and have a progress tracker in place, to help me stick to the schedule.

Strategic vs Tactical

Coming from a product background, I started off by writing the PRD (Product Requirements Document) for my film on Bodh Gaya. This was where I had done all the strategic planning about what, why and how to film? I used Evernote and Google Docs for this as they were available across devices and this had later helped me a lot in run and gun filming.

Primary research about Bodh Gaya, captured in Evernote

Since this was my first film, I wasn’t so sure of what to expect from the shoot. I didn’t have the clarity on how lengthy would the film be, or what kind of topics it should cover. I wrote down all the possibilities in the PRD, along with —

• the list of Interview Questions for different sets of people, and
• the list of all the Timelapse, Slow Motion and B-Roll shots to be filmed.

Bodh Gaya — PRD (Product Requirements Document) in Google Docs

I kept on editing this document by adding more sections to it in an ad hoc manner, till the time of the actual shoot. Having a vision document in place was really helpful in the production phase.

Then came the tactical planning, which helped me translate the grand vision of the film into a to-do list. This is where I broke down the project into smaller tasks needed to be completed in order to release the film successfully. I used a product management tool called Asana along with Google Keep for this purpose, as they proved very useful in my day job.

Tactical Planning in Asana, a Product Management Tool

Time to shoot!

The plan was to stay in Bodh Gaya for 2 days and I merely had 30 hours to do whatever I had planned for. Till the time I actually visited the place, I was skeptical about filming the temple. I was afraid that all these efforts would be in vain, if my film gear wasn’t allowed inside the campus, like in most religious sites across India. Fortunately, the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya allowed them inside on a special ticket worth 300 Rupees.

Following was the final list of gear I took along with me for the shoot —

• Canon 70D with 18–135mm STM Lens
• Simpex 333 Photography Tripod
• 2 Lanparte E6 Batteries with LP-E6 Adapters
• Zoom H1 Recorder with the Wind Screen, DIY Shock Mount & Boom Pole
• DIY Camera Slider
• Small LED Flash light for shooting in the dark

I visited Bodh Gaya along with my dad and it was immensely helpful having him by my side on my first outdoor shoot. You’ll later see his guest appearance in the film near the Bodhi Tree. A government employed tour guide showed us around the campus, while explaining the significance of each of the sites there. Opting for the tour was so resourceful and helped me shape the structure of the documentary.

Bodh Gaya B-Roll Shots and Interview Planning on Google Keep

I started shooting various B-Roll shots I had earlier listed down on a Google Keep checklist, which proved to be very handy to me on the field. These included Timelapses, Hyperlapses, Slow Motion and Slider Motion shots. Luckily, during the time of our visit, there were around 500 monks who visited Bodh Gaya for a World Peace Prayer from various countries in Asia and Europe, and the US. I could successfully interview 12 people in one day. Including the B-Rolls, I came back home with almost 16o GB of footage!!

Agile Methodology to the Rescue!

Since I had never worked with so much of footage in my entire life, at first, editing it seemed very overwhelming to me. With only nights and weekends to produce the documentary encompassing 15 interviews and nearly 20 hours of footage, I turned to the principles of Agile Methodology to stay on top of it all.

I divided the work into weekly scrums, spending 15 hours a week, with specific targets for each week. I revisited the progress on each Sunday night and accordingly adjusted the tasks for the upcoming week. First, I started sorting out the footage into various categories and synced the sound from my Zoom H1 recorder with the videos captured.

Microsoft helped me ‘Excel’

Once I started listening to the interviews, I realized that it wasn’t going to work if I didn’t have a visual aid to interpret all the inputs and to easily rearrange them in order to create the perfect storyline. Hence I started transcribing all the interviews in Microsoft Excel. Listening to 20 hours of footage while pausing them to note down the points along with their timestamps was the most boring part. Yet it laid a great foundation for the documentary, and made the structuring of the flow pretty easy later on.

Capturing the inputs from interviews and categorizing them

Instead of directly editing the film and making changes in the high fidelity output again and again, I used these Excel sheets as my low fidelity wireframes, where I could constantly reiterate on the flow, based on my vision and optimized the length of the film.

Shortlisting and re-sequencing of the inputs to form a logical story flow in Excel

After shortlisting and re-sequencing all the inputs, I divided them into logical chapters. This helped me identify several missing pieces of information in the transcribed sheets which were needed to complete the story I wanted to tell. Also, I found out that there were a lot of shots missing from my B-Roll collection, which could have been useful to complement the interview sequences.

Luckily, during that time, our CTO’s marriage was fixed in Patna, Bihar, which is just 3 hours away from Bodh Gaya. I grabbed the opportunity and bought my tickets to the place with a plan to visit Bodh Gaya for a re-shoot. I then created a list of interview questions and missing B-Rolls for my second schedule and updated the PRD.

Updated PRD with the Schedule 2 Planning

The second schedule too was a success! I came back home with additional set of interviews and the shots I needed. Then I again transcribed the new videos and arranged them in their respective chapters. Once I felt the storyline had reached a decent state, I started editing the film chapter-wise.

Adding Colors to the Frames

As mentioned in my previous article, I used Davinci Resolve 12.5 for editing and color grading the entire film. Tip: It’s better to maintain a separate Resolve file for each of the chapters (5 mins long) and to later combine the color graded outputs into a master file, in which, the music and subtitle tracks can be added.

Bodh Gaya — Davinci Resolve 12.5 Editing Workflow

User Testing and Product Launch

Checklist of changes from User Testing

Understanding how people experience your product is very important if you want to achieve high user satisfaction. Hence I put aside a week’s time to show the first cut of the film to as many people as possible, before I released it. I listed down all the changes that my users had suggested on Google Keep and struck them off one by one, as I re-edited the film. After 10 weeks of hard work, the documentary was finally in a good shape and was ready to be shipped.

Ladies and Gentleman! Introducing to you —

‘Bodh Gaya: The Seat of Enlightenment’, directed by MSN Karthik and produced by adwhyta.

Please do share your valuable feedback after watching the film. Also, rate the film on IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6607390/

You can read about how I made a Sci-fi Thriller Short, ‘The Countdown’ in under $75, with the help of this DIY approach to filmmaking here —

How I made a Sci-Fi Thriller short film in under $75_Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith first. The trust part comes later._movietime.guru

Call to Action

Thank you for reading this article. If you’ve read this far, please consider recommending it.

If you are a filmmaker or a PM, I hope this article has inspired you to further your passion. It would be far easier for you to get automatic updates on my new films, if you can join my facebook messenger subscriber list in the following link and clicking “Get Started” there:

https://m.me/adwhyta?ref=link

I will be posting blog articles on each filmmaking milestone I reach. If you have a question about filmmaking or have something interesting to collaborate on, contact me at karthik[at]adwhyta[dot]com.

Adwhyta: My Film Production Channel — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU7XVC0jMY1tGEUf6m3lC0w

Raga Riot: My Music Channel — https://www.youtube.com/RagaRiot

Check out my other articles:

How I made a Sci-Fi Thriller short film in under $75_Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith first. The trust part comes later._movietime.guru

Becoming the Zero Budget DIY Filmmaker_Precisely an year ago, in the early monsoon months of 2016, I got my calling. A calling from my future self. He asked…_medium.com

Thus, I Travel. — M S N Karthik — Medium_For me, to travel is to live. It makes me modest. You realize how tiny a place you occupy in this world once you get…_medium.com