our own best critics

I remember it as if it were…fifteen years ago, now that I think about it. The year was 2007, and CVWmedia had long struggled with balancing a full workload while ensuring that our creative standards were as relentless as the number of projects that were coming our way.

To adapt, we needed to find a way to guarantee we’d never let any project slip through the creative cracks just to make a deadline. That’s not easy, but then a member of our production team had a great idea: Schedule a no-excuses weekly meeting where we’d turn off the phones and watch all of our ongoing projects together, critique our work and exchange ideas, and then go back to our desks and make whatever changes came out of our discussion. We called it Weekly Critiques—Weeklies for short—and that’s still what we call it now.

Such a simple solution to a universal problem for a busy production company, right? Well, no, as it turned out. Or at least it wasn’t at first.

Our first Weekly Critiques took TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS. Yikes. We all returned to our desks behind on our work, and some of us probably had to work overtime that evening as a result. That was obviously unsustainable, but we knew we were onto something, so we scheduled the next one and all agreed that we’d have to learn to be concise in our feedback and calculating in deciding whether (and when) to speak up. It didn’t take long for us to realize that what our critique sessions needed was a time budget, so we set it at an hour. We eventually dropped it to thirty minutes and used an hourglass timer in the middle of the room as a reminder to get straight to the point and make next-action decisions efficiently. That’s where we remain today, meeting as a group every Wednesday from 2:00 to 2:30 to review our work and figure out ways to make each project the best it can be.

In addition to our own work, sometimes we take a few minutes for what we call “We Didn’t Make This,” where we take a look at work created by other people or companies. Sometimes it’s a video, other times it’s an animation, and once in a while it’s another type of art that one of us found interesting enough to share with the group. Creative inspiration can be found just about anywhere, whether it’s a contest where 3-D animators each start with the same animation template and create their own unique scene, or this dog who paints better than I do.

So, who does this meeting benefit? Everyone! For our clients, Weeklies means additional sets of eyes on each project (no extra charge!) so that everything is polished up nice and shiny before client review time comes around. As individuals, Weeklies keeps us in a frame of mind that welcomes critique while teaching us how to be efficient in articulating what we’re seeing and how we feel about it. As a team, Weeklies builds great habits, in particular the free exchange of ideas in real time with the project right there in front of us. It also strengthens teamwork and comradery and gives each of us a feeling of ownership of all of CVWmedia’s work, not just our own individual projects.

Sometimes it hard to stop working long enough to evaluate that work, so I’m glad we made the decision long ago to make Weekly Critiques a part of our schedule.