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It all started when…

After getting tremendous feedback on “The Ultimate Team Chat for VFX” I decided to share ideas, even if they’re not perfectly thought through till the end. I’d like to give starting points for studios out there to pick up my loose ideas and develop it into proper business processes and production workflows.

This article shows how a (very) simple appliance of rocket science can boost the shot feedback process by at least 20% and again reduces the communication blur caused by non-physical presence. You will learn the principle, that

  • A simple grid saves money, time and teams.

Before getting to the solution, let’s have a look at the problem to identify the needed processes.

Coordinate system

Our industry is used to communicate in coordinate systems. It’s more than obvious in 2d/3d by communicating in xy(z) coordinates to describe room related information. Now if you step back a bit you will also notice, that we use other kinds of measurement systems to refine the information. The simplest example are shots and frames to describe a hierarchical and temporal position down to a single image.

You see there are naturally grown systems to serve the one basic communication need of our industry: to point information to a certain position in time. I got a picture on my Mac which I carry around for years now to describe this simple communication principle in a simple picture:

AutomotiveFeedback.jpg

So after understanding the needed communication principle, let’s have a look at a blind spot of our industry:

The lower left corner

What you saw before is a screenshot of review tool Wipster. but the same functionality is offered by a whole industry around providing solutions for professional feedback. Let’s name frame.io, cineSync or Frankie to give a fair market overview over the tools I’ve personally been in touch. They all have in common, that they offer a system to convert descriptive information into

The reason why No matter which area of the industry you are, no matter which project you’re working on. You will always get into the “Lower Left Corner” situation. It’s the moment someone uses descriptive language to point to a position of an image. Even worse it can be “the lower left corner in the wide shot after the closeup”, which uses descriptive language for positional (where) and temporal (when) information.