Workflow & Process

What Stalls or Slows Down High-Volume Creative Production

Time is money. It's a simple truth that resonates in high-volume creative content production, where efficiency is...well, everything.

When creating content to meet the high demands from consumers, brands need to generate, execute, and deliver content at breakneck speed in order to increase both revenue and influence. Any setbacks impair the creative production process for luxury brands and companies who rely on View Imaging as an extension to their teams.

As high-volume content creation experts, preventing slowdowns is built into our process.

Throughout our years of experience, we've amassed an arsenal of effective tools that allow us to side-step delays before they come up. Read on to learn about six things that stall or slow down high-volume creative production and, how to prevent them.

© Costa Brazil | Retouching by View Imaging

1. Incomplete Project
Kickoff

We're mentioning this one first because if you don't get this right, you're bound to experience slowdowns in your creative production. Not to mention, this point feeds into all the others. Basically, an ineffective kickoff is starting off a project in ambiguity or confusion. Maybe you are missing key information, like design elements or product details. This lack of clarity could stem from not having clear lists and guidelines for the project and not being prepared with the right questions for the client during your kickoff call.

We know that communication goes both ways, so you're client's communication during kickoff also plays a role in stalling production. This happens when the client comes unprepared to the kickoff, doesn't clearly communicate the project goals, or provides a vague brief. Any ambiguity creates slowdowns down the road that compound along the way when you're left trying to figure out what the client is thinking.

On the flipside, a great call results in you and your client walking away with clarity and alignment. Here at View, we've got our pre-kickoff and kickoff lists, guidelines, and questions down to a creative science. It takes time to figure out exactly what the right formula is, and we have experience—a decade, to be precise. Because of this, we're able to anticipate and prevent any breakdowns in the process.

© View Imaging

2. Confusing Points
of Contact

What exactly are we talking about here? Imagine you have an important question to ask the client, and you can't continue with the project until it's answered. You ask who you believe has the answer, only for them to tell you to ask someone else, who tells you to ask someone else, who has to ask someone else. The time it takes to find the answer from the right person sets the project back by days—which is the worst-case scenario for high-volume creative production. Frustrating right?

Having undefined roles and unclear points of contact inevitably results in slowdowns. To prevent this, get to know who's who and to whom to direct your questions. That way, you'll have your questions answered in a timely manner and keep the project moving along smoothly.

3. Unclear Timelines
and Expectations

What results in unhappy clients and creatives? Not establishing clear timelines and expectations. Clients may perceive deliverables as late or not meeting standards, while creatives may have to push to meet unreasonable deadlines, compromise on the quality of their work, or redo assets, all of which slow down the process.

Effective timeline planning often comes down to your project managers. Project management requires a specific set of skills and a certain brain to create timelines that work for all scenarios. For example, an awesome project manager is able to shift timelines, prepare for possible slowdowns, and build in extra days should your team need more time to deliver. At View, our project managers get this.

But let's face it, as much as you plan on your part, sometimes things on the client's side go awry. To prevent further delays, both project managers and the team need to embrace flexibility, figure out moving targets, and be able to adapt on the fly.

© Harper's Bazaar | Photography by Peter Lindbergh | Retouching by View Imaging

4. Mid-Project
Changes

Adapting on the fly brings us to our next point. Think of the butterfly effect: Just as small changes can have a large impact, mid-project shifts can cause major setbacks. To illustrate this, let's start with copywriting. Changing the wording of something—even just a single word—could affect every asset. This is because copy is often tailored to specific word and character counts.

For image retouching services, a request to fix "one thing" in an image requires re-exporting and re-adjusting to different sizes and backgrounds, turning that one image into twenty. When it comes to product photography for E-ecommerce, the client saying, "Actually...can you shoot it this way?" could cause significant slowdowns. This new request could require an additional lighting setup or camera angle. It could be a challenge to squeeze in—and—require an extra day of shooting. Adding to the time delay, an extra shoot day comes with significant financial costs. Think of a full extra day of renting a New York photo studio and hiring crew, models, photographers, etc.

Clients often don't realize that one "easy" tweak or change request has a cascading effect. To prevent these slowdowns, there has to be an open line of communication from the get-go—a relationship built where the client feels there's nothing too small to reach out about. The better and more frequent the communication, the more clients are able to relay changes early on—and understand the implications of implementing them.

© View Imaging

5. Vague and
Ineffective Client
Feedback

Quality feedback undoubtedly drives progress. But in order to receive quality feedback, you need to define what exactly it is: Clear, actionable, and unanimous. Sometimes, conflicting comments come in, where one person says one thing and another says something different, and you’re not sure what to execute. In those instances, you have to follow up with the client and ask which direction takes precedence.

At other times, the client gives confusing feedback. In these instances, your team has to jump in to help figure out what the client wants. We’ll have an internal team call for an hour, then spend another hour with the client, and before you know it, considering different time zones, we’ve spent half a day in the search for clarity. This makes things way more complicated and drawn out than they need to be. That time would have been better spent producing assets.

To prevent this, we always ask our clients to give quick, clear, and concise feedback, including a summary of what they expect us to implement. As much as we love National Treasure, we’ll leave the deciphering of cryptic messages to Nic Cage.

6. Failure to Work in
Batches and Seek
Timely Feedback

Our final point is the result of team error and is detrimental to the efficiency of the high-volume production process. If you don’t work in batches and get early feedback from the client, odds are you’re going to end up with one error across many visual assets that could have been caught early on.

This is often a rookie mistake—it’s tempting to want to churn and burn the assets out, get them out the door, and hope your client will be stoked. In a fantasy world, that would be great, but most of the time that’s not how it goes. They won't be so thrilled if there's an obvious error that now has to be fixed across all assets—or if they weren't given the opportunity to catch it before it became a problem.

For example, we have what we call “alignment” files that we use when we need the client to officially approve something or give direction. That way, we’ll be on the same page from the start and won’t have to go through, say, 300 files before hearing back that the background color is slightly off and a little too blue.

© Primary | Retouching by View Imaging

Let's Wrap It Up

So, that’s it—we talked about the importance of preparation for kickoff calls, the need for clear communication and project management, and the impact of mid-project changes. We also highlighted the significance of understanding timelines, expectations, and the costs associated with additional requests. Since every moment counts, we do all we can to prevent these slowdowns in our high-volume visual content production.

By being aware of these challenges upfront, addressing them, and working through them, you’ll have a less-stressed team and more satisfied clients. This ensures you avoid delays, maintain quality, and create a smoother production process over all.

At View Imaging, we’re pros at this. Our motto, “Make More Beautiful,” not only applies to our ability to produce quality assets, but also to how we do so at high volumes. If you’re interested in our full-service photography and creative visual content production, schedule a call with us.

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