Every year in the last few weeks before TIFF starts, I struggle with staying on top of the press releases and trailers while doing my day job and making sure that everything I need to do at work is sorted before I take a week off to watch movies.
Well this year, thanks to joining the team here at Blended Perspectives, I have a way to:
- Build my list of top TIFF selections.
- Add value at work while building my list
- Confirm that you can use Jira to plan just about anything
I hear about movies in the early announcements, but when the full schedule comes out I get overwhelmed or honestly just distracted by a well-chosen still and I forget about my early faves. It’s difficult to retain all the things you are excited about when you are on the receiving end of a fire-hose of information – and you are also trying to plan a schedule within a few short business days before you need to make your picks to build the final schedule.
This year, before I am overtaken by panic and paper cuts, I decided to enlist the help of one of our CEO s – Martin Cleaver – to break my list of activities that end in the magical spreadsheet schedule and look at how I can use Atlassian products to help with my process. Every year I have different problems to solve, like “How many movies do I dare schedule at the Scotiabank Theatre in case the escalator is busted again?” or “Am I getting too old to see midnight movies at midnight when I have a 9:00 AM film the next day?”.
Regardless of the new and old problems, I basically have the same 4 major buckets of work to do each year:
- Build the long list
- Build the schedule
- Create the list for ticket selection.
- Create the final schedule
Today I’m focusing on the first one – Build the long list
For today, I am using out of the box features – no custom fields for director or country of origin – (although I did create a Canadian label so I can get my Cancon)
My Epics are the programs. I didn’t include Short Cuts or Wavelengths because I don’t normally see films from those programs.
My stories are the films, I’m using the priority in the same way I use my coloured Post-it flags – HIGHEST and HIGH would map to a green flag to indicate the films I am most interested in seeing when I am operating in the blissful ignorant vacuum before I check if the film is coming out within 6 weeks of the festival, if it’s a Premium or if it ends up conflicting with other movies that I really want to see.
Then I can attach the TIFF films to the related epics, so I have an idea of the early balance in my preferences – at the beginning I always find that the documentaries tend to dominate my top ten selections of the 30-40 movie I plan to try and select, but that will change over the next few days.
After I finish populating my list, I can then use the backlog to order the films dragging and dropping to my obsessive heart’s content. For the first time in over ten years of attending TIFF I’m modifying my approach to creating this first list and it’s already so much easier to scan and review.
Next week: Building the schedule
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