QUOTE: Director JJ Abrams on how much to prep projects
February 17th, 2010
“In general, what I tried to do, is prep as little specifics as possible in terms of shots, so I wanted to be able to go to the set and make things up as I went along, and sort of, you know, wing it. … Within the parameters of what we had, I tried to storyboard nothing so that the [movie] would have energy and would feel vital, and we’d get to make it up as we went along.”
- JJ Abrams, director of Star Trek, when asked how much of the movie was improvised versus planned ahead of time.
I heard this quote last week while listening to the commentary track on the latest Star Trek movie. It was a great reminder for me that the process of iterative design, and not planning out everything ahead of time, transcends software development. It also reiterated it’s effectiveness to me for creating inspired products that consumers really want. When your design decisions and inspiration are based on real world feedback rather than judgements made in a vacuum, I don’t think you can help but have a better outcome.
DL February 19th, 2010
Star Trek is an awesome movie. I think it’s pretty cool to hear that he took such an “just roll with it” approach to filming it. Obviously it was a good idea. Hey maybe we should use the same approach in our work. ;)