Wrote this up for TheoryAnimation Blog: Why most projects fail.

Hi everyone :slight_smile: I’m David, co-founder of Theory Animation. You might know us as the team behind Ray & Clovis! A few days ago I wrote up this blog post on why teams fail. I know a lot of us get excited to work on team projects - especially in the beginning when the ideas feel sexy and fun. As they progress though, hurdles and challenges are inevitable. I hope you enjoy it. Here’s the full text:

Animation is like an expedition: As you climb a mountain, the air will get thinner, but the view will be amazing.

Like any team endeavor, low oxygen, lack of preparation and training, and not working together can all spell doom for your ascent. You wonder why it takes so much effort to create animated films; Frozen had been tossed around the studio since the late 1990s until it finally released in 2013. It’s really simple:

Problems, hurdles, and challenges are part of the journey.

Let me tell you a story. This week I was at Kidscreen Summit showing off our pipeline and talking to amazing producers of animation. I’m also the one making sure all the pieces come together for Ray & Clovis shorts (I do the final compositing). I thought it would be pretty simple: I’ll do my meetings during the day, and at night I will comp from hotel wifi. What a mistake that was. For anyone here who ever had luxury of using hotel wifi for work, you’ll quickly realize your emails are better sent via pigeon. Needless to say, I was dependent on the whole team to figure out any production and pipeline issues.

Boy did we have a hell of a production issue.

We had shoulder bug with our rigs that was quickly fixed. We caught it halfway through production though, after much work had been approved, and thought nothing of it. For anyone who doesn’t know how animation works: after your work is approved you hit a button and book a trip to Miami for a week. That’s because it will take that long for the computer to process what you just did. We call it rendering. Most call it lunch time.

It takes five days for us to render about a minute’s worth of Ray & Clovis. Even low, proxy, renders can take a day, but still hide errors. We had errors. By the time we got back our images we could see the error: Ray’s arms were going through each other. All of our work was for nothing.

And I was at a conference. Talking to people can be fun. Talking to people for 12 hours without stopping can be a migraine. I had a migraine.

In his seminal book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lecioni lays out why most teams fail. Lack of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Basically your team fails because no one has balls to own up and figure out what to do. Teams fail because when a hurdle comes, they smash right into it because they’re too lazy or afraid to jump.

Teams fail because the honeymoon is over and the hardwork is frightening.

I was unable to help out at all. Wifi was no good, migraines didn’t help, and a long drive rendered me useless. However, the team deduced the shoulder bug, other render problems were found, and our main render man, on the eve of his wedding anniversary, was shedding more hair in one day than he had in one decade. Preparations were made to do any rework if necessary, but in the end, it turned out just restoring old files was what was needed. The team stayed up until 1am both days to try and figure it out.

They figured it out.

If you ever find yourself in a project with more than one person, you have to be willing to trust them. No more elementary school “I’ll just do all the work myself” class projects. You need to be willing to let the team work together and work through a problem - no matter how long it takes. Without that team chemistry, you’ll just run out of air and fail.

What do you all think?
Also if you’re interested in production, I talk about it in our blog plus our behind the scenes videos :slight_smile:

Cheers all!
:dA: