Nomination for Best Animated Ad Film (International) at the FICCI Best Animated Frames awards 2014

As a startup success always seems fleeting and elusive, but when it does arrive it is a rather calming and reassuring experience. It is simply an acknowledgement of the risk and effort involved and often serves as an encouraging reminder that bigger, better things await. At Last-Bench, despite our infancy, we've had many such moments and none bigger than getting nominated for a prestigious award - Best Animated Ad Film (International) at the FICCI BAF awards.

The FICCI Frames is a three day global convention covering the entire gamut of Media & Entertainment like Films, Broadcast (TV & Radio), Digital Entertainment, Animation, Gaming, Visual Effects, etc. with nearly 2000 Indian and 800 foreign delegates encompassing the entire universe of media and entertainment attending the event in 2014. It is also Asia’s largest global convention on the business of media and entertainment. The highlight of the conference is the Best Animated Frames (BAF) awards that celebrate excellence in the digital entertainment and animation industry over the last year.

Last-Bench representatives at the FICCI BAF's

What's makes this recognition extra special is to see something we built from scratch, enthused with all our hard work, get recognized on an international stage. It's almost like a David vs Goliath story, where we were pitched against some industry heavyweights like Prime Focus, Cartoon Network, Hungama, Disney, Nickelodeon and still managed to get recognized. Of course winning the award would have sent us to cloud nine but getting nominated itself was far beyond our imagination.

Our entry was our in-house sales video for our content design services. Prior to development, our goal was simple: create video that would convince every viewer that they needed a video made by us. For that we'd have to truly create something special. And we did. In retrospect, we did accomplish our goal but it would be a lie to say we were supremely confident about getting there. It is through sheer effort, dedication and creative brilliance of the entire team that we even came close to achieving something this big.

Our Content Design Services video

What made the development process even more challenging were the many hurdles that we had to face as we lacked the size or muscle power of a bigger production house. Remember, when we developed the video we were a team of 5 and it would be impossible to dedicate people to the making of this video without negatively affecting other aspects of the business. The big question was: Can you develop a high quality video, inclusive of ideation, scripting, storyboard, animation, editing, etc., with a virtually zero budget, within a month and without a dedicated team? What turned the odds in our favor was the abundance of skill and creativity within the team. Discounting timelines and budgetary constraints we not even for a moment ever doubted if we could build something this special. We knew we could create something spectacular but the real challenge was developing a 3 min animated video with a minuscule budget and within a month! Suddenly we felt like we were our own clients! And like every other client of ours, didn't we end up satisfied :D

Emotions impacting TEAMS!

"Team player", "Team", "Teamwork" - are terms that are so so so often used in our lives whether it's at college or getting your first job and even as we progress in our careers. Everybody as an individual talks about being a team player and many of us are true team players too.

Everybody knows the traditional definition of a TEAM and what it takes to be a team-player but in this blog I'll talk about something more deeper than accomplishing a common task. I'm going to talk about the impact of EMOTIONS in accomplishing that one common task.

Let's boil down a team of 'x' members to a team with just one member - that's you. Now imagine, you're working on a project to accomplish a goal. You set a plan and start executing the plan. The good thing about this project is that there are no external dependencies so it's perfect right! You don't have to depend on anyone to move forward in your project. The first few days are super, you put in the 10-12 hours daily and everything goes well the first week. By the end of the week you're extremely motivated and plan your task for the next week. On completion of your week 1, you decide to take it easy over the weekend and go out with your friends for a drink. The party you thought would get over by early night really ended the next day morning. You're extremely tired and want to hit the sack as soon as you reach home. So now your weekend goes for a toss and you're running a bit late on your schedule but no worries still. You're motivated and tell you're self that I'll cover up in the coming week. You then begin your work motivated but then at the start of the week itself run into major technical issues and start getting worked up because you're not able to solve them. You put in another day's effort but still the issues dont get resolved. Finally, you decide to make some desperate calls and you don't find the intended solutions. You've started to get a headache and just try to get some rest. Once you're up, you think about the situations and start getting angry at the fact if you hadnt partied, you could've got 2 additional days. Everything starts turning glum and demotivation starts setting in. Your project now takes 5 weeks to complete that could've just taken 2.

What I want to highlight with this story is that with a 1-member team and no external dependencies things can go for a toss due to the impact of emotions. In this example, it started with high motivation, happiness, sense of accomplishment, relaxation then turned into extreme stress, anger and demotivation.

Now imagine a bigger team. Everyone in the team when working towards a common goal bring a wide range of emotions towards the work. Some of the members may be very highly motivated and think about the organizations success, some may be highly motivated but may think only about their success in the goal, some members may just be doing the tasks for the sake of doing them and instead prove to be a hindrance in other's work too and some may bring their outside emotion to work maybe like a fight in the family, a sudden loss, failure or success and even internal/external competition.

The bigger task is for the leader who needs to manage everybody's emotions and also his/her own emotions while working on achieving targets.

So for the leaders out there: achieving your goals with your team is one thing but managing your team members emotions while achieving goals is a whole new story!