Roadmapping Session
Roadmapping Session
When you’re ready to tackle the music for your film, you must know what you want and you have to communicate that to your composer. Failure to know what you want or failure to communicate what you envision for the music dooms your picture to mediocrity at the very best.
Roadmapping is the process by which I will ask you a well-designed number of questions designed to help you communicate exactly what you want for your film. I will get to know you, your interests as a filmmaker, what brought you to committing to the film in question, and it will help me understand your needs.
By the end of the process, I’ll know exactly how big or small, fast or slow, rhythmic or spacey your music will be. Further, you’ll get a summary of the meeting. If you decide to employ me to do the music for your film (and I think you will once you go through your first roadmapping session), there will be zero wasted effort.
A typical roadmapping session lasts two hours. It’s done over Zoom.
Before starting on any journey, I like to plan ahead. Wouldn’t you like to know where you’re going before you start?
I offer this Roadmapping service as a way to help us both understand where you’re going, how long it will take, how much fuel (budget) you should expect to use, and what risks we’ll face along the way.
After our session, you’ll have a clear and concise roadmap that will help you solve the problems your project faces as quickly, safely, and economically as possible.
Here’s what to expect with our session together:
1. DISCOVERY
You: We’ll go into more detail about you, your project, the people you’re trying to reach, and your plan for success.
The Problems You Face: I want to learn more about your project, and specifically what problems you are facing.
The Payoff: We’ll dive into your project in more detail, and establish exactly how this project will be beneficial to you and your career, and yield a return-on-investment in the forms of financial gain, increased contacts, and artistic satisfaction (yes, all three!).
This part is all about definition and clarity. What defines success? What defines failure? The more I learn about you and your project, its problems, and the goals that you have, the better I can help you define a Roadmap to reaching those goals.
2. ASSESS RISKS AND PRIORITIES
After I've learned as much as I can about your project and what you want tomorrow to look like, we’ll assess and analyze the risks in moving forward. We’ll talk and we will bring forward anything that could keep this project from being successful — maybe the budget’s too low, the timeline’s too tight, or there will be a degree of research and experimentation needed.
My goal here is to systematically identify anything that could cause your project to fail, and then spend the rest of our session together mitigating these risks.
3. DEFINE AND REFINE THE AUDIENCE
Here, I want to learn about the types of people you’re trying to reach, and attempt to gain a better understanding of who this project is intended for.
4. REASSESS RISKS
Now that we’ve really fleshed out this project and have come up with a few paths that will help you solve the problem you face, we’ll revisit the risks we identified at the beginning of our session and see if they’re still a concern.
5. CLOSING
Finally, we’ll take the roadmap we produced and compare it to the business goals you established at the start of the session. Have we come up with anything that holds us back from reaching your goals? Are there any closing thoughts or suggestions on how we can solve your problem faster or better?
After the session concludes, I’ll get to work producing an exhaustive summary of our session, along with projected budgets and timelines that you should expect moving forward.
Deliverables
Two hour roadmapping session
Unilateral non disclosure agreement
Single page summary
Action steps summary
15 minute follow up session
"Map and route" by NeilsPhotography is licensed under CC BY 2.0