6 tips from non VFX organisations for your creative studio
Commander’s Intent: Define the goal, not the steps.
The Pre-mortem: Imagine the failure to prevent it.
The $200 Rule: Take all small loss vs big wins bets
The Braintrust: Diagnose the problem; don’t prescribe the fix.
The 2-Pizza Rule: Keep the room small and the accountability high.
The Silent Start: Buy back brain time.
Commander’s intent:
In the military, they say ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy.’ In VFX, the enemy may be a wrong technical approach, unclear creative direction, or contradictory feedback.
When the ‘plan’ breaks, your team needs more than a task list—they need Commander’s Intent.“
Commander’s Intent (CI) is a 1 sentence description of what success looks like at the end of the mission. It doesn’t tell people how to do their jobs; it tells them why they are doing it. If the pipeline breaks or the lead goes offline, the CI is the North Star that keeps the team moving toward the goal.
Let’s say a general wants to take over and hold the east side of a hill.
He makes a plan.
But even when the plan went to hell, and the whole battalion got decimated with only 2 men left, they’d better do something about covering this east side
Example of CI in VFX:
–Zero obvious mistakes. This can be applicable when you have a tricky or defying client, where every error will be held against you. Rigour is your best ally.
–A picture you would frame at home. Great if you want to reach the highest quality, or bring a creative touch to some content
–Take the shortest path to the minimum viable product. If you want to contain the budget by limiting creative feedback, or putting man-days into over-delivery.
Pre-mortem meeting:
Most studios perform a Post-mortem—a look back at what went wrong once the dust has settled. Cognitive psychologist Dr. Gary Klein argues we should flip the script.
A Pre-mortem asks the team to imagine a future where the project has already failed. It’s a creative exercise in disaster. By imagining the “What went wrong?” of the project, you give your team “prospective hindsight”—the freedom to speak up about risks without sounding like a pessimist.
In a standard briefing, a junior artist might not want to “ruin the vibe” by pointing out a technical flaw. In a Pre-mortem, that’s their job:
The 3D Artist: “The project failed because the resolution is so big we couldn’t render all shots overnight. Some feedback we had time to do, but not to render.”
The FX Lead: “The waterfall sim was so heavy it ate our local storage. We literally lacked 20TB on our drives.”
The CG Supervisor: “We relied too heavily on one sub-contractor; when they went offline for two days, the whole pipeline stalled.”
The Producer: “The client’s board changed mid-production, and because we didn’t have a ‘kill-fee’ or scope-limit for that specific asset, we bled out on man-days.”
The $200 auto approved rule
In many corporate structures, the process of spending $20 is the same as spending $2,000.
The CG trader test:
How long does it take an artist to go from finding a $10 asset on CGTrader to having the source files in their scene?
If the approval chain takes more than 3 hours, the artist will simply model it themselves.
Auto approve micro-mudgets:
Non-VFX tech startups often use “Spend Limits.” By giving staff a pre-approved monthly “Innovation Budget” (e.g., $200), you change the studio culture:
- Speed of Execution: If a $50 plugin saves four hours of manual labor, the artist buys it and moves on. The studio wins.
Innovation is inherently “risky.” When an artist has to “build a case” for a $100 experimental license, they often talk themselves out of it to avoid the perceived judgment if the test is not conclusive. It would be perceived as a failure. But taking a bet that is small loss ($100) against potential many man days won, is a rational bet to take.
Trusting your seniors with small financial decisions isn’t just a perk.
If you don’t trust an artist with $200, why are you trusting them with a $200,000 project?
Braintrust meetings
Pioneered by Pixar, the Braintrust is a recurring meeting designed to strip away the politeness that often masks a project’s flaws. Unlike a standard “dailies” session, the Braintrust isn’t about hitting a deadline; it’s about elevating the soul of the work.
The Golden Rule: No Solutions Allowed
This is the hardest part for technical artists to grasp. The goal of a Braintrust is to diagnose, not to prescribe.
- The “What”: Discuss what works and what doesn’t. Deepen the collective understanding of why a sequence feels “off.”
- The “How”: Avoid saying, “You should change the lighting to blue.” Instead, say, “The emotional beat in this scene feels cold, and I’m losing the character’s expression.”
The Braintrust is a diagnostic tool, not a repair shop. Its job is to find the ‘cracks’ in the story or the visual logic. By the time the meeting ends, the lead artist shouldn’t have a to-do list—they should have a deeper understanding of the challenge.
Pixar’s braintrust meeting Image Credit: Disney/PIXAR
Expanding the Trust: The “Customer Panel”
You don’t need to limit this to seniors. Product consultants often use “customer panels” to find friction points that experts are too close to see. Bringing in a non-senior staff member or even a colleague from a different department can provide a “fresh eyes” perspective that identifies “uncanny valley” issues that the core team has become blind to.
The Two-Pizza Rule
Popularized by Jeff Bezos at Amazon, the rule is simple: If a team cannot be fed by two large pizzas, the meeting is too big. In the VFX world—especially since the shift to remote work—digital calendars have become cluttered. It is easier to invite “everyone” to a Zoom call than to curate the right stakeholders. The result? Staff become experts at navigating meetings rather than navigating problems.
The Passive Mode Trap
When a meeting exceeds 6–8 people, a predictable human dynamic takes over:
- The Spectator Effect: Attendees enter “Passive Mode.” They stop contributing and start multitasking (ever sent emails in the background while in a meeting?).
Abstract Communication: Active members stop talking to each other and start talking to the crowd. Everyone waits for someone elses to pick up on what you just said. Who’s job is it to handle it?
A 8-person meeting for 1 hour isn’t a one-hour meeting. It’s an 8-hour one. A whole man-day.
The silent start meetings
Another pillar of Amazon’s meeting culture is the 6-page memo. No PowerPoints are allowed. Instead, every meeting begins with 20 minutes of total silence while everyone reads a printed (or digital) memo.
The “Improvisation” Trap
We’ve all been there: jumping though back-to-back meetings. We “wing it.” We’ve become experts at performing “readiness” without actually being prepared. 2 months on a job and we mastered the art of improvising meetings
- The Problem: When you improvise a meeting, you are in a reactive mode. Your brain had no time to think of deeper problem/solution situations.
- The Solution: The Silent Start forces the “Quiet Time” that no one has on their calendar. It signals that 100% of your attention is required—no background emails, no Slack pings.
The VFX Application: The “Feedback Deep-Dive”
Imagine a client feedback session. Usually, the producer reads the notes aloud while artists scramble to look at the frames for the first time.
- The New Protocol: The first 10 minutes of the meeting are silent. Everyone—the Lead, the FX Artist, the Comp Sup—goes through the client’s markup and notes individually.
When the silence ends, the team isn’t discovering the problems; they are already solving them.