By James Fair
Unsurprisingly, most of the fascination around the 72 Hour Movie project ‘The Ballad of Des & Mo’ surrounds the process of filming and editing it so quickly, especially in relation to the projects that can take months. In this post, I’m going to focus on how we turned it around in such a short time. I wrote a post for Ted a while back titled ‘The Shape of Things’ that explored the organisational structure of the 72, so I won’t repeat that here. Instead I’ll concentrate upon the necessary elements that must be present in order for the process to work alongside the organisational structure.
The simple target is to maximise effectiveness from the effort. People assume that you would have to work hard to make a film in 72 hours, but that is not as valuable as being productive and efficient. In fact, it is the opposite! To be productive and efficient is to achieve a significant amount with a small amount of work. Efficiency is the ratio of the useful work performed by a process to the total energy expended. If it is hard work, something has gone wrong.
