life

Long ago, during an interview for another-one-of-those engineering positions, I was told that diligence/industriousness is not enough. “How about an example?”, I asked.” Tell me how you would manage your own time”, he said.

For years, that question has planted seedlings after seedlings of time-optimization methods into my mind.  In larger corporations, diligence is enough; but where low-resource environments are concerned, you better know the difference between diligence and impact. While these ideas have always existed in my mind, working on Okiku was the perfect incubator for them:  We were limited in time, resources, man-power, and just about every decision had to be made the moment any question was posed.

So, finally, without further ado, here are some of the top things which I believe our team did astoundingly well. Go team Takeout!

1) Plan it down to the second (well, not literally). For Okiku, we made a storyboard. We had every scene sketched and planned down to the second. Not only did this help make our goals clear from the get-go, but the clear direction really helped everyone take the initiative to own a piece of the project. You don’t need to be a leader to lead, you just need to help others realize the direction.

2) List needs vs wants. Make a list of things that needs to be done vs things you’d like to get done. In a low-resource environment, it’s incredibly important to avoid burn-out from doing things that isn’t significant in the first place. Also, as humans, we tend to migrate towards the easier-to-check-off-items.  Sure, it would’ve been nice to have had a prettier asset, or maybe we would’ve love to fix the logo or title page, but we never had the luxury of getting to that point, and chances are, neither would you.

3)  Assess Impact. So now that you know what needs to be done, which items will have the most impact on returns? For Okiku, we decided that we would focus on the art. Not motion, not cinematography, not humor — plain and simple, we wanted beautiful, breathtaking art. In a 3D world with 3D submissions, we realized that our art better be damn good.

4)  Anticipate Bottlenecks. The team was somehow amazingly good at anticipating bottlenecks.  Paul, our sound engineer, did not need to wait for the project to render before putting sound in. Instead, we sent him chunks of the project whenever they were finished.  From the little bits of ever-changing information we sent him, he was able to make several versions of score so when it came time to put the entire project together, Paul (our final bottleneck) only took an hour. I’m pretty sure he set a record in efficiency. (;

5)  Assess Risk Carefully. Probably more important than impact is the risk your company will be expose to if something is or is not done. For Okiku, our biggest risk would be being disqualified by not following the strict rules… so we read and re-read them a bajillion times. Yes, a bajillion. Believe it or not, of the 72 teams that entered the 48hfp, we know of 6 that were disqualified for not using the required line of dialogue correctly. I hate to state the obvious, but if there’s anything you should devote your time to, it should be analyzing your risks.

6)  Learn and have fun. We didn’t win the grand prize, but I know our work will pay off. Why? Because we did the most learning and had the most fun. And we’re pretty sure the rest of the teams realized this too. ha.