
On a big film kick this week thanks to the festival. Coincidentally the BBC Peter Day's World of Business podcast which I've recently been hooked on, recently did a segment on craft. No, not as in craft services or the things you aunt does. But craftsmanship and skills.
A big part of Peter Day's view (if I recall correctly) is that the benefit of craftsmanship is you have people working in a realm with their fingertips. Not managers or executives, but actual doers. These people have a unique means of problem solving, though many firms overlook this benefit and focus on the "management" side of things.
One of the segments in the show features an interview with a small firm in New Zealand that Peter Jackson hired to do a tremendous amount of models, set and prop work for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A seven year project. They completed tens of thousands of individual pieces. What was most interesting about this segment is they dove into how Peter Jackson goes about making a film. Even before a frame of film of shot he has meticulously gone through every frame to determine the needs, set a vision, and send it off to the right people. Traditionally in Hollywood they note the segments that require some digital work or special effects and send it off to the agency that works in that realm and it becomes their problem. But, in the end you end up with a special effects segment that feels nothing like the rest of the film.
In the ad agency world, we fall victim to this very fault too often. A creative team is empowered to come up with an idea, but once it goes outside the realm of what they are deemed to be experts in, or the section of the agency they happen to sit in, it no longer is in their hands. Or it gets taken from their hands. Now, this is not necessarily a matter of ego or empowerment , or lack there of, but in the marketing world everyone is so quick to jump on claiming they are one thing or another (I'm TV, or I'm digital, or I'm a designer) that once you have multi channel ideas, you require people from each channel. Thus, you no longer have a creative challenge to solve, but a management/people challenge to solve. Basically, everyone is trying to use the same hammer. One to hit a broadcast nail, one to hit a digital nail, and another to hit a design nail. What if instead, we put in the finger tips on one craftsman (i.e. creative team) a multi-tool and allowed them to problem solve.
now I know this is far from the first time anyone has thought of this, but it was really interesting to me that Peter Jackson found a way from a creative and management perspective to bring his vision to life.
But then again, one could argue he was just empowered to do so.