Tracking Production

[Ilidrake]

Making an animated film is work. Lot's of it as everyone knows. So my question for a mini, say 2 minutes, whats the best way to track assets? Models, props, actions, rigging....basically everything you need to finish the film. How do you keep up with where everything is and where you need to go? I ask because I am in the middle of such and am looking to streamline my method. My method being I don't really have one. I just sort of make up things as I need them. But if one of you guys have something that works and helps I would love to hear from you.

[Darkwing]

Well for Red Squad I created a full blown production bible. Lists every asset, every actor, every scene, what stage each asset is, due dates etc. It's been very helpful in keeping track of everything

[Ilidrake]

Nice Darkwing. What sort of program did you use. Paper? Spreadsheet? Can you give us a screenshot?

[itsjustme]

Have you tried Celtx? It has a lot of tools that I think would fit the bill.

 

Hope that helps.

[Darkwing]

Nice Darkwing. What sort of program did you use. Paper? Spreadsheet? Can you give us a screenshot?

 

It's just a spreadsheet. Here's a PDF of it, dunno if this is the current one though

Production_Schedule.pdf

[Rodney]

I hesitate to answer here because I'm currently not using one specific method for tracking production (one has to have a production to track!)

I will offer the following:

 

When in doubt simple is better.

If a piece of paper will suffice for tracking... use it.

After paper I'd say an excel spreadsheet would be ideal. MS Excel's conditional formatting can make easy work out of keeping track of a production. It can be set to automatically color code entries so that you have visual cues to let you know the status at a glance.

 

I'm currently investigating more complicated production management tools.

 

On 'Tin Woodman of Oz' a program named 'DotProject' was used.

DotProject is very similar to standard product management tools that you'll find out there and I've sample more than a few. Where I think they falter however is in ability to customize and link in assets useful to a production made with programs like Animation:Master.

 

I'm going by memory here but I think one of the downsides of DotProject was that it had to be ran from a server... not sure if that is still the case or not. Access was a problem and ultimately it was used by mostly one person who tried to track all aspects of TWOs progress.

 

One of the best programs I've seen is well out of my pricerange and it is the combination of two programs, Shotgun and Cinesync. When it first arrived on the scene I signed up and got a cold response that made it seem obvious that money was going to need to be invested before diving deeper and exploring. As I didn't have time or money at that moment I opted to wait and see on Shotgun. Since then I haven't seen much that would suggest that I should join up. The plus of Shotgun and Cinesync is how it deals with real time viewing of animation footage.

 

Hobsoft is another great application but if you aren't working on a multi-million dollar feature... it's outta your price range:

http://www.hobsoft.net/

 

(I would love to be able to use that program)

 

More recently I came upon the announcement for 'Tactic' and it looks to be promising.

Tactic is a production management tool used by quite a few visual effects houses and it recently went Open Source.

 

http://www.southpawtech.com/

http://www.southpawtech.com/tactic/features/

 

What I especially like is the ability to dig into the code (lots of XML) and tailor the tool to fit the project.

I envision a system where all the various assets are gobbled up into the project manager where they can be viewed, checked out/checked in, analyzed and annotated. Tactic is the best effort I've seen that suggests we can actually do that. It comes in several flavors and I'm currently working with a standalone.

 

It should be noted that most of these larger approaches are extreme overkill for a one person short film but it might not be if it was specifically tailored to management of A:M assets. So, that is why I'm investigating Tactic.

 

The one thing that Tactic doesn't have that other expensive options do have is it's own form of analysis/feedback with regard to annotating status and given visual feedback. This is usually seen in programs with capability to draw on top of video. I think this will be forthcoming... and it can be accomplished through workarounds... and it'd be a lot less necessary within the production manager itself if that feedback is mostly accomplished in A:M itself. I'll have to get a full setup going before I'll be able to adequately assess that.