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Summary

• Godzilla Minus One won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects despite having a much lower budget than its competitors.  
• The film’s VFX team consisted of only 35 people, yet they created stunning effects, proving that having a smaller, more efficient team can lead to success.
• The team’s lean and agile practices, such as having the customer and the delivery team in close proximity, focusing on outcomes rather than output, and having empathetic leaders, contributed to their success.
• These practices, commonly used in lean agile development methodologies in software development, can be leveraged in various fields to create efficient and effective products.

Godzilla Destroys the Oscars

Even if you didn’t see the most recent Godzilla offering from Toho Japan, Godzilla Minus One, you might have noticed that it won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects (VFX). This is quite an achievement since the movie cost $15 Million, and its competitors spent substantially more. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (GoG3), by Marvel, cost $250 million to make, plus another $150 million in marketing. The awards were only part of the victory of this underdog. Godzilla made over $115M internationally, a 6.6x return on investment, while Guardians made $845 million, a 1.12x return. What’s truly impressive is that Godzilla’s VFX team, consisting of only 35 people, created such stunning effects. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 had 1,233 people on its VFX team. 

The Godzilla team made a short video highlighting how they could pull off what seemed like an impossible task. Make Godzilla on the cheap. I highly recommend watching it:

For those familiar with lean/agile practices, many of this team’s practices should jump out as reasons for their success. Let’s highlight some of the reasons for the win. 

The customer was right next to the delivery team

A knowledge tax is created by putting people between the customer and those delivering the product. This tax manifests itself in miscommunication, delays, and loss of feedback. The larger the organization, the higher the tax. The bigger the project’s goals are, the more impact this tax can have. After all, a small misunderstanding at a lemonade stand doesn’t have the same impact as a small mistake at a nuclear power plant.

If everyone delivering the project is on the same site as the customer, it removes the knowledge tax. 

The goal here wasn’t to assemble the cheapest possible team but to get the best people, fewer of them and put them into the same room. This allowed for rapid evolution of what needed to be done. When something changed, the whole team knew about it and could adapt together. 

Focusing on outcomes

When starting any project, there is a temptation to list everything that must be done to succeed. In a movie, this list may be a fully drawn-out storyboard of every shot the director needs to produce in the final film.

In software work, a similar storyboarding process demonstrates the flow of a user experience. Unfortunately, when storyboards (movies or software) become a list of items that must be completed, they turn into a list of requirements. 

When storyboards are rigidly followed by a director or project manager, you can forget the goal and mistake the list as the goal. The list of shots the film had to complete is the output of each day of shooting. However, if those video shots don’t add up to an engaging, exciting film that people want to see, it doesn’t matter how closely they meet the storyboard drawings. Storyboards are a great way to make a film cheaply or even map out a user experience in software, but they are never the goal; instead, they are a method to develop shared understanding. 

Let’s look at this set from Godzilla: 

Instead of building many ships, they created one standard part of them and built a movable platform, as seen above. This platform could tilt back and forth as though it was on the water. Then, they reused the set for all of the boats they had.

This was one of the few “set pieces” that could move, so they used it in another scene in the movie, where a building collapsed.

They changed the shots based on their equipment. They remembered that the goal was to create an exciting movie, not a specific shot. This focus on outcome over output helped them build a film on a smaller budget, adapting to what they had. 

Empathetic Leaders

Here, we see Takashi Yamazaki working with his VFX team. You’ll note he was the director and VFX supervisor. Throughout this video and other interviews, he illustrates how he knew which things would be easier or harder for some of his staff. He would change his shots based on his expert knowledge to ensure the work could be done. 

A leader who does not understand how the work gets done can lead to a misalignment in expectations. Only some technically able people can be leaders, but the best leaders of technical teams have a technical background. Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron all credit their success to learning to be camera operators and specializing in special effects when they were younger. Note that none of the winners of Best Director have ever been finance people or lawyers. 

Parallelism

You don’t have to be making a Godzilla film to use these practices. These are all techniques and ideas that have been made prominent in lean agile development methodologies in software development. This framework has been used in a variety of venues. It isn’t the only framework for solving problems as a team, but it has proven over time that many of these practices can be leveraged to create efficient and effective products.