Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512183
56 M PS E . O R G will hear your work in its entirety for the first time only in the dubbing room where making major changes becomes rather complicated. Sure, we preview individual elements or scenes beforehand, but it's always with caveats, and their attention is focused on the problematic elements rather than the overall perception. On the other hand, you never introduce all sounds at once in a mix because it becomes hard to discern what's clashing. It's easier to understand what's missing and then add it. Therefore, the sooner you show a director a "Minimum Viable Product," the sooner they will start getting used to your ideas and you won't stray too far off course because with each sprint you will only refine what's necessary. You can slowly add what's missing rather than wading through excess produced "just in case." However, it's challenging to assign such a task to someone who still thinks "horizontally" within a uniform task. A vertical approach is needed where you think of all elements together. To do this, we divide the film into several 8- to 10-minute episodes and distribute them among three teams of 3-4 people ensuring that each team has one experienced member and two novices. Each team has to edit and premix two episodes in full in 10 days, so they could be viewed as draft mix. Clean up dialogues, create ambience, design FX and do a premix for review. Foley recordings are made throughout the entire film in the first iteration. Who does what within the team is determined by the team members themselves. You can clean dialogues in one and do FX in another. When you handle diverse vertical tasks within 20 minutes, the brain inevitably sets priorities and it's easier to maintain the whole pool of ideas than when Recording black powder cannon for The Conquest of Siberia (2019) in the suburbs of Moscow. Atmosfera © Multiposition recording of horse movements. Three exterior sets and full onboard set for Viking (2016) in the suburbs of Moscow. Left to right: Stanislav Krechkov, Dmitry Boyarintsev, unknown rider. Atmosfera Studio© I understand that they're not always needed over music, but let them decide during the mix. It's easier for them to remove than for me to add. This is a somewhat oversimplified reasoning, but the younger the specialist is, the more accurate the general assumption becomes. In the course of this process, I came across an article about iterative work methods like Agile, a widely adopted methodology in software development where you break down the work into time intervals—sprints of 2-3 weeks—and deliver a "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP) at the end of such sprint. It's minimal in terms of features but a ready-to-use application that with each iteration (sprint), is refined based on feedback from real users who've started working with it. Typically, several teams of no more than six people work to avoid complicating communication. They self-distribute tasks for the sprint. This is a very effective approach, for example, when developing a service app for a smartphone. If you try to develop a fully polished product from the get-go, by the time it's released, all the devices it was designed for might become outdated and half the features might end up being unnecessary. It seemed to me that this is very similar to what we face in sound post-production. A director used to the editing guide