Case Study: Deadlines—Emphasis on “Dead”!

Challenge: Prepare extras to appear on the 9 DVD even when it seems impossible

Concept: Short movies about full-length movies have all the same challenges as big movies.

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The computer-animated movie 9 (2009).

We were three weeks out from delivering approximately two hours of content for the 9 DVD when my client at Universal Studios and her boss called me at the edit bay. The tone of their voices immediately alerted me that the news wasn’t good. They’d just come from a meeting with their bosses, asking if we could deliver the DVD bonus features one week early. My knee-jerk reaction is always to say yes, but I couldn’t make this promise without consulting my staff, so I called the office and told everyone not to go home, because I was calling an emergency meeting. We had been working quite efficiently and would have sailed smoothly to the original deadline in three weeks. Losing a week would be a challenge, but we all agreed we’d put in night and weekend hours, so I called my client and said we’d do our best to make it happen by the new deadline, with an extra day or two if we needed it.

A week later, as I was driving to an appointment, I checked my Blackberry to find about 11 missed calls from my office. I called the office, and when Matt—my number one “preditor” (producer-editor)—got on the line, he sounded defeated, depressed, and exhausted. “What’s wrong?”

He didn’t even try to soften the blow. “The hard drive with all of the media for 9. It died.”

Now, you might think, well, what about the backup drive? Because, certainly, you’d have a backup drive . . . right?

And that’s what I said: “Well, don’t we have a backup drive for Peggy?” We name our drives; Peggy was named for Peggy Sue from the Buddy Holly song.

“Yes, after Peggy failed, I plugged in Ringo, and Ringo failed.”

My heart started to pound and my palms began to sweat as I tried to get my head around the impossibility of the situation, not to mention the unlikelihood of two hard drives failing simultaneously.

My voice failed, too, as I rasped out, “Ringo and Peggy failed?”

Matt was resigned, “Uh-huh.” At this point, he’d had two hours to fade into this numb state. I was just at the starting gate.

“Turn everything off; obviously something is wrong, corrupted, a virus, a short, a…” I stopped, because I didn’t know what could have caused this cataclysmic problem. And then a really weird thing happened. My brain, like both Peggy and Ringo, failed. I could not speak, because I could not think of anything else to say. “I have to call you back,” I stuttered, hitting the end button.

My brain was numb—except for the part that was trying to imagine how I might pull my guts up from my feet, which is where they had plummeted. I was barraging myself with images of not only missing our new deadline but being weeks and weeks late on our old deadline . . . starting over. My brain shut down and I drove in silence, my stomach still twirling in my feet.

That lasted for about 10 minutes, until the Real Me, the Problem-Solving Me, the Dynamo Me, returned from her brief hiatus to Panicsville. (Actually, they’re all the real me: the panicked, insecure woman who couldn’t talk; the crazy person whose stomach had taken a nosedive; and Wonder Woman—we’re a package deal. I just wish the cool, tough chick was the only real me. She’s the best of me.)

I called the office again. “Matt, do we have the lists of what we did so that we can reconstruct everything, or are those on Peggy and Ringo?”

It appeared the lists were actually safe on the main computer, so I had Matt back them up, just in case. Worst-case scenario, we could redo our work, using the lists as a guide. It would take time and cost a fortune, but it could be done. We weren’t dead yet, just sick. Next, I called the man who had sold us our editing system. When I explained that two hard drives had failed consecutively, he agreed that that was overwhelmingly odd. He told me we would have to redigitize all of the footage on new drives. With 200 hours of footage and less than 200 hours to finish the project, I wondered how that was going to work.

By the time I got back to the office, I found my entire staff brainstorming about what we could or couldn’t do to solve this problem. Turns out we had a third backup that had about 70 percent of the media on it. Considering the circumstances, this was good news, and I added it to my list of options, because I knew that I had to call my client and explain that no matter how lucky we got, we’d lost valuable time, and we weren’t going to make this new deadline.

However, I would not call her until I had a plan and a backup plan for recovery—and until I could make my voice sound like the voice of Wonder Woman (or at least a competent professional). Remember, never let them see you sweat—which might entail a shower and a change of clothes before any phone calls.

About three hours later, I called the client. I explained that the drives had failed and that I had three plans to successfully deliver the DVD content. Her response: “Wow, Laura, I don’t understand how you can sound so calm.”

My answer to that? “I didn’t call you until I could sound calm and until I could tell you how we were going solve the problem.”

She was impressed: by my professionalism, my three solutions, and my ability to speak without hysteria. Luckily, she had missed the croaking, not speaking, stomach-in-the-feet me of mere hours before.

By the way, the techs were able to recover about 90 percent of the data. We lost three workdays because we had to rebuild what was missing from the pieces. We worked even longer hours and actually made the shorter deadline! And the problem? A $2 plug that had gone bad. With a $60,000 system, a bad plug brought us to our knees. Where we prayed.

Takeaway: Get hysterical, then calm down, come up with a solution (or three), and execute your problem-solving plan.