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Comment by tonnydourado | Hacker News Reader

Also, I have the impression that movie making is a fairly cascade-like process. You pitch a movie, you make the movie, you deliver the movie. There are stories of extreme change in requirements, but they seem rare.

Meanwhile in IT, you pitch a movie, you find that the movie is solving the wrong problem, or doesn't have market fit, or the requirements were wrong, you adjust, repeat this a thousand times, and in the end you deliver a comic book with a qr code that links to a web series on YouTube.

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I believe that's more to do with your relative knowledge of either industry. Movie-making is a much more dynamic business than software making: scripts can vary dramatically depending on who's attached to the project at each time, on the cutting room after first viewings, directors can get replaced midway through shooting, etc etc etc. It's madness.

Exactly. And this is true for a lot of industries. Developers seem to have the impression that only software is a bit "messy", but that's because we're looking from the inside.

People wonder why large construction projects are often delayed. Well, it's often for the same reason it happens with large software projects.

You're 100% right. This it's the exact same reason why the writers strike affect something that I theory should have not effect as the shooting or editing of a movie.

In my experience media production only follows the waterfall model in paper or a really small projects, in practice it's like a chaotic version of Scrum/kanban with no standard that changes from production to production.

> You pitch a movie, you make the movie, you deliver the movie. There are stories of extreme change in requirements, but they seem rare.

It's probably more likely to happen on too-big-to-fail movies with terrible writing. Superman's upper lip[0] is a fun example.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yKoE9Tld10

That depends a lot on the movie. Apocalypse Now is sort of an extreme example of this: large parts of the movie (including the ending) were completely rewritten during filming, some scenes were completely improvised, the lead was recast from Harvey Keitel to Martin Sheen after they did about a week of shooting, an entire massive on-location set was relocated after being built because the director wanted it to be right on the river (and the original set was also destroyed in a typhoon), another set which was destroyed in the same typhoon was used as-is because Coppola liked how it looked, and the helicopters they were renting from the Philippine military occasionally flew off set in the middle of a filming day to fight an ongoing insurgency elsewhere in the country.

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