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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

I guess this partially explains why making a movie or TV episode can cost millions / hundreds of millions of dollars :-/

Yes, Dothraki being an actual language is probably "better" than Leia speaking gibberish to Jabba, but to me it feels like it's way past the point of diminishing returns.

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See also the articles about the level of detail in the costumes in Game of Thrones.

There is a lot of attention to detail, probably including a fair bit that doesn't make it on camera, in big budget video/film productions. You could probably cut a lot of it and still have a "pretty good" final product. But being obsessive about detail rather than being content with good enough in all sorts of aspects of production, including the acting, is one of the things that separate competent shows from really good ones.

I get that. But spending a lot of money on things that don't make it to the final cut always felt like a waste to me. I'm very very marginally into filmmaking (see bio), and I've always had the impression that costs and time could be cut drastically just with better planning.

I often wonder what would happen if you applied startup principles to making a movie. Thinking in terms of MVP, customer value, efficiency, on top of the artistic vision. This is not just talk, I'm putting my ideas to practice by producing two zero-budget feature films with an extremely lean mentality. Let's see how they turn out :)

Reminds me of "The Matrix" with detailed sketches of how exactly should it look.

Most movies do this. See: http://www.storyboardsinc.com/news/archives/2274

That's called a story board. As far as I'm aware all movies and a fair few TV shows do this because it's cheaper to sketch your idea out before you hire expensive camera crew, lighting, etc

A lot of effort (and lots of time) can go into the development of a show or film. Yes, it can cost quite a bit of money in absolute terms to go through multiple rewrites, conceptual development, storyboards, screen tests, etc.--sometimes over the course of years--but it's still generally dirt cheap compared to the daily costs once you flip on the production switch.

you don't know what's gonna make the final cut though. Stuff like language creation is super early on in the process at which point you're trying to engineer a system for success. It makes sense because you don't know what you're gonna end up with and overshooting is better than missing.

Exactly -- that was part of the mindset behind Weta when they were working on the Lord of the Rings movies. They rejected the attitude of avoiding detail "because no one would see it anyway," because putting in that detail would then open up flexibility in terms of what shots could actually be done, because there was the confidence that whatever they made would hold up.

I mean, you can consider the cost of making a language like this as part of marketing. It's getting thousands of people online to talk about the show.

I don’t know much about film, but I can imagine someone saying the same thing about programming. We spend all this time building things that get replaced before they even ship. We celebrate programmers who remove more code than they add. Surely this is a huge waste that could be avoided with better planning?

Saying this as a software engineer that has been on movie sets - you have no idea how disorganised, chaotic, and wasteful they can be, and how long hanging is the low hanging fruit in terms of making processes more efficient.

You might already be familiar with it, but Robert Rodriguez pursued a very budget-conscious approach when filming El Mariachi.

Much of the approach is explained in the DVD extras to the film, but is summarised on the film's Wikipedia[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mariachi#Production

If there is a lot of money, people will spend it.

As long as everything goes up this is fine.

When things start to get flat, money will dry up.

I don't know the first thing about filmmaking, and my terminology will probably be wrong, but...my uninformed speculation is that creating coherent, consistent, high quality raw material gives the editors (or whoever) freedom to compose the best final cut.

Honestly paying this guy to invent a language mustn't have been that expensive. It's just one extra salary in a show that employs hundreds/thousands of people. And I think these details help create a stronger following, because nerds love this kind of stuff. The community behind the Dark Souls games for example wouldn't be the same without all the secrets in those games.

I don’t see how this explains those massive costs. It’s one salary out of hundreds of millions, and it’s a one-time investment.

Plus, once you have a language, you can translate an English script into it vs constantly making up (inconsistent) foreign dialogue as you go.

Well, the language is extended as needed, so it's still making up foreign words as you go. They just have to fit into the language properly.

By "partially explains" I meant that if you spend money in this kind of thing, minor details that sometimes don't even end on the final cut, the costs can add up. I'm wondering to what extent the producers get good value for their money, or whether the Pareto principle applies here - is it possible to make something 80% as good for 20% of the cost, by focusing on the 20% that matters?

For an extreme example, think Transformers, where hundreds of millions and dollars can't save bad writing. Making things better at the screenplay level is probably much more cost-effective than spending millions in VFX (or, in this case, creating a full language where subtitled not-entirely-random gibberish would probably do)

I'd say Transformers did a pretty good job of doing what it set out to do (make money) even if you and I don't care for it :-)

Certainly there are good "little" movies that get made on a relative shoestring. And even more shorts and arthouse fare. And modern video equipment makes it a lot easier to mostly use natural lighting and the like.

That said, mainstream TV and movies have made most of our standards pretty high. I'm always somewhat amazed by how much gear gets brought in by a video crew to shoot a few minutes of talking heads to use on a company web site.

> think Transformers, where hundreds of millions and dollars can't save bad writing

The box office result says otherwise.

(Note: I'm explicitly making an economical argument, not an artistic one, since that's what the thread focuses on.)

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