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Post mortem anxieties

Post mortem anxieties

Posted on February 14, 2026  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Education

Postmortems are the best way to highlight issues on a production and learn from past mistakes but on the last stretches of a show, as the team members are already allocated to other projects or looking for the next gig with still plenty of work to do, it can be difficult to find the time to sit down and look back in time to remember issues that ought to be resolved for the next show in order to improve processes.

What about if there was an easier way to go about it by making it more collaborative interactively throughout the production?

In the past I used to write down my postmortem notes on the last page of my notepads which was great but I couldn’t add gifs or videos and my colleagues couldn’t participate or often, I would point at issues that my colleagues had missed out entirely or forgotten in their own postmortem, making me the annoying guy with more notes than anyone else 🙂 

Recently what I started doing instead, was to use our team chat (Slack, Teams, Discord) to share my postmortem notes as I came across issues.

Chats are dreadful when it comes to sharing information (this will be a future topic) but if you use a very specific keyword like [postmortem] at the start of your message, sorting out notes becomes a breeze when using search filters.

In addition this allows you to add demo videos and gifs to trigger a conversation and sometimes find solutions that other team members, or even yourself, weren’t aware of.

Not long ago, we discovered that a team member had trouble picking a tiny blue on blue control in their viewport in wireframe mode. Obviously the control wasn’t in the picker either so instead, we told them they should try the Xray mode! Alt + x is my favourite hotkey for it.

Is this quick tip useful to you or how do you go about postmortems in your company? Any tools you would recommend?