My name is Andrew Jamison and I’m the Senior Producer for The Third Floor London’s Immersive team. We create digital content for VR and AR and our latest project, Mad Factory is being released to the masses in September.

As a Producer I am primarily responsible for three things, quality, budget and schedule. It is the balance of these aspects that I must consider every day.

Early in my career I was given the option to choose a Design or Production career path. I am now a Producer due the variety of tasks it throws up, the satisfaction I get when solving the problems from daily issues to long term risks and that I am involved with the project for its entire lifecycle. That my name is near the top of the credits list is a bonus.

Being a Producer on a project mainly involves using common sense, but there are a few key questions to initially ask and keep asking during development are:

What must the team do?

What is the team capable of doing?

In what order must they do it?

How much can be done?

What do we do to ensure it is right?

Production is often referred to as Project Management, but this is a small part of the responsibilities a Producer will take on over the course of a project.

Firstly, I need a project. This involves outreach, pitch creation, bidding, pitching and follow up. If other employees own this then I feed them with the info they need.

Then over the course of the projects development I will be doing the following:

Create job spec’s, triage CV’s and conduct interviews

Build, update and monitor a schedule and apply a project management methodology to the development

Communicate constantly with the team, with peers and with clients

Review and improve development pipelines and processes

Manage the team’s personalities, holiday, sickness and mood

Hire actors, hire studio time and arrange mocap shoots

See the title through platform submission, launch and post launch

Work with Marketing to create a plan and provide them with assets

Attend or arrange conferences and promotional events

Review hardware and software requirements for the department

It’s a job I thoroughly enjoy primarily as every day is different, I meet and interact with a wide variety of people and solve the puzzle of releasing a project everyone is happy with.