Agile Vs. Formal Production

Traditional top-down models are increasingly running up against agile bottom-up approaches on the Web, creating a clash of cultures, but also driving innovation.

An table chart of the top ten pixar movies based on their worldwide gross

Pixar has released 10 blockbuster animated films since 1995, with reasonable control over development budgets over that time, but escalating economic returns. Source: http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/Pixar.php

New communication and development tools and processes are entering the creative arena with increasingly speed—and some might argue, power. They are most readily adopted by younger cohorts who are coming of age in an environment where fast, open, and lightweight—and often based on personal tools such as social networking—are the coins of the realm, in contrast to the often risk-averse, slow, and silo-ed traditional development approaches, tools and business models. This migration is also a result of the increasing overlap between technology development and media development as more media goes digital, bringing technology models with it. As a result, creative industries are among those grappling with a friction between this new agility and the more formal models.

Signals:

During the development of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson made extensive use of more informal, personal technology to speed development cycles on the epic films which were spread across development teams worldwide, including a system of iPods loaded with rushes, which were couriered from New Zealand to London and other production sites daily.
Animation pioneers Pixar brought the agile development processes which many of its animators and technicians picked up in graphics software and hardware circles to the studio’s creative processes, enabling it to innovate quickly on new animation techniques and speed production of films.
Accelerating release cycles for new media, such as newspaper, film and band Web sites, increasingly integrate Web 2.0 and social networking technologies which rely on agile development processes themselves—including using features and technologies that are often novel and unproven, or for personal use, leading to quickly morphing sites and services.

Implications:

New skills, techniques and timescales must be integrated into larger media organizations’ internal processes, leading them to behave more, not less, like startups.
Changes to economic models will be forced onto more traditional businesses as they seek to remain competitive and innovative, including accommodating shorter, more intensive development cycles, and the ROI horizons that accompany them.
Traditional businesses will have to come to terms with the implications of existing in a constant state of alpha and beta release, which is common in the technology industry. This means less potential control over creative processes, and fluctuating economic models, with greater opportunity for negative as well as positive outcomes.

Countertrends:

Some organizations may embrace a return to authentic, auteur cultures, with slow, careful and risk-averse production cultures that produce more considered output to fill gaps left by less traditional media. Independent filmmakers, musicians and media, for example, may slow release cycles and produce more costly but unique product as an intentional counterpoint.
The “consumer as producer” trend may also lead to slower, less innovative production techniques re-entering the arena more prominently, as it centers on careful handmaking with less regard for innovation.
Large MMORPGs, such as Starcraft II and World of Warcraft, are seeing years between release cycles due to the technical complexity of development. As the underlying structures and delivery of these games—a mix of online and offline, social network and traditional gameplay—grow more entangled, production times and processes may continue to grow.

Extrapolations:

The shift to agile production could encourage further fragmentation of media products into more lightweight, episodic forms, reminiscent of earlier eras of media production, with many upstart print journals or film serials made by smaller producers. Shorter films released in episodic fragments, the digital equivalent of EPs in music, and serialized books released in chapters as they are written, all fed to digital devices as released, could be a result.