Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

Planning is Everything

Its an old cliche but no less true now than ever in the digital age. In fact perhaps even more so as options and flexibility continue to dominate the cinematic industries. So in that line of thinking Ive come across a very simple tool that adds a great deal to planning and structuring cinemaic works.



Called MindNode this small and simple app for OSX follows the long tradition of Mind-Mapping tools.  Long a hip buzz word in business and mangement circles the cocnept in many ways is more tangibly and pragmatically applicable to creative development.

MindNode allows you to build complex flow diagrams to illustrate structures of any kind. The purely practical application would be to layout DVD menu's or Website plans using MindNode; an extrmely effective way to visualize and pre-test the the flow of content from menu to menu.  Technical directors and post-production supervisors will see the potential for creating informatics of post-production workflow; showing how footage will be handled and processed through the various stages of visual and audio post. Producers and Unit Production Managers will immediately see the benefits of planning the stages of pre-prodction; a visually diagramatic checklist of the stages of Pre-production. To take a larger step a tool like MindNode also has great potential for planning narrative structure from a screenplay; using the nodes to plan plot-points and major events and character development.  Anyone with a visual mind will find befeit in using MindNode to layout information that might otherwise drwn in textuality.

The best bit about MindNode is not just that its free (at least for now) but thats it's simple! Its not bloated with features you're never going to use. Its not trying to be all things to everyone. its not tryign to throw in the kitchen sink. Crimes many other such mind-mapping tools are certainly guitly of. MindNode is fast, simple, can be mastered in 3mins flat and is very veyr functional. My only gripe would be that nodes cant be connect toeach-other in a non-linear way, its purely a diverging tree-bunch structure. Next version may add this and then it would be perfect.

Posted at 12:00AM Jun 27, 2008 by Mike Jones in general  |  Comments[2]