I just read Neil Davidson blog on learning lessons from Rodriguez's movie making. It's nice to see another fan with similar views.

I thought Neil's point about having a clear vision and script was dead-on! "He still had a script though. Most importantly, he had a clear idea of what the film was going to be..." We find that out team is the most productive when we have the visual design (wireframes, storyboards, and CSS) mostly done ahead of the implementation. Of course, we fine tune the design with the back-end software.