Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Divide and conquer

Around here, as soon as the director turns his back, the producer is looking for stuff. Incomplete cuts mostly, so he can upload them to an ftp site or whatever and show them to people who should never get to see incomplete cuts because they have difficulty in understanding the concept of 'incomplete'.

It's like the old line tester days. You'd show a client a pencil test and you'd get a look of horror followed by, "it will be in colour, right?"

So the producer 'steals' incomplete cuts from the animators or compositors and then forms a series of rather stupid questions. But that's just one aspect. I have noticed that the producer will often ask a director how long something will take. Unhappy with the answer, he'll ask individual animators who only ever know how long their own particular part will take. As that answer is shorter, the producer happily takes it and makes up new schedules.

Divide and conquer.

2 comments:

Andy Latham said...

Normally when a problem persits for a long time, it gets fixed. So how come the seemingly age old problem of bad producers in animation hasn't been sorted? I don't think I've ever heard anyone in the industry speak kindly of their producer!

Ron said...

OMG sooo true.