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This video is meant for Delura’s contributors who have actively worked on the series since its inception. I initially was going to send this video privately, but I thought people might be interested as to the huge amount of work that is going on behind the scenes… even if that work isn’t the most exciting out of what we do for our viewers.
I’m not a content contributor. But I thought that I’d offer an idea or two. Or just allow me to be the crazy guy on the street corner talking to himself.
Have you thought of maybe moving from that forum system to a more formal ticketing system for tracking work on the project? I ask this because what you are attempting to do here is very similar to managing a software project. Granted, there are also differences too; so this may not be a perfect analogy. But there are enough similarities on the surface to at least keep me babbling for a few paragraphs.
Where I work (software development) we use the JIRA system – http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview
The great thing about something like this is it ties into other systems. There are plugins that track subversion commits, code reviews,a wiki and continuous integration (ie make sure the blasted thing still compiles, deploys and passes unit tests). We can go to one place and easily see what is related to a certain ticket.
I do wonder if something *LIKE* a ticketing and subversion repository might be useful to …..umm….free you up from manually having to track meta data things like this. As well as helping you determine who did what and how much to a given thing. It sure seems like your digital assets would make sense to go into a versioned repository of some sort. Yeah, dropbox is “disk space” and does keep backups. But perhaps implementing some sort of versioning of your assets would also pay off for itself down the road? The ticketing system tied into that I know works great for us where I work. But again, this is software development So it may not apply enough to be useful to your production. But we are a distributed group geographically so if we didn’t use something like JIRA and subversion I honestly don’t know how as a bunch of people in different places that we could function as a group.
As always, I’m not a digital producer nor do I play one of tv. Just some ramblings of an old man
After a bit of thinking, a non central versioning system like “git” might make more sense over a centralized one like subversion for Delura.
Ticketing system, well, that’s a whole fun thing to find one that meets your needs and price.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of “Git”… seems like a very confusing program.
I would like to find some kind of better collaboration solution eventually though, as the task list on the creator’s end is very sloppy to deal with (tons of html tags to filter through, and customizing tables for more efficient usage of space is awful!).
I have considered Celtx for collaboration but the program is far too clumsy to ask others to work with it… so I only use it for basic screenwriting.
The best solution would be something that everyone has access to, is blatantly simple to understand and can easily be tailored to our workflow. I’d love to have a solution similar to the HTML-based one I have right now but without the messy backend code.
Git may not be the thing for you. It was merely a suggestion as a starting point. It would seem soon not only will you want storage of assets in a common place for all but also you’ll want to version assets. Creating a folder structure and naming them w/ dates I suppose works. But it can get messy quickly. Git was suggested as it doesn’t need a central master repository. It works w/ peer repositories syncing data. But, again, I’ve seen it managing source code (text files). It may not be the best for binary assets like Lightwave files, images and the like.
It looks like you are growing your brand (or trying to). So it’d be a shame if you got bogged down in administrative tasks with your time instead of maximizing the time that you spend on creating content. That’s what I took away from part of that video. That there’s going to be a lot of overhead tracking work and making sure everyone gets their fair share. It looks like you are initially going to be doing this in a semi manual manner.
You obviously have things well in hand. It was just an observation. You’re a talented guy. So I’m sure that you can make any tool work w/ enough time. But sometimes one gets so close to a situation that one might miss an opportunity to streamline some things.
Agreed. Hopefully with time we’ll be able to get enough residual funding to be able to consider either commercial software or something suitable for helping me get everyone on the same page *quickly*. As for tallying the income numbers, that is something I intend to do with an excel spreadsheet to start off, and payments initially will be every 6 months or so assuming the dollar value is $25 or more. File management actually isn’t too much of a concern right now… but will be once the art team gets to 10+ people.
If it means anything I honestly think it could work even if it’s for a short time,it’ll probably be better to start with this than with no organization at all.I hope(and I mean hope) that you guys can get put in the right gear and get all of this taken care of;after all, you and your co-workers deserve it.*thumbs up*
I know for certain the system will need to evolve or adapt over time… and yes we have to start somewhere. There’s also the idea that there really is no one-size-fits-all thing out there. The challenge with what we’re doing here is that I’m having a hard time finding examples of instances where a system like this has actually worked (I mean in reference to digital media). So, even though records will say it is a long shot, there is still the possibility that Delura could be one of the first 3d animated series to sustain itself with viewer support.
We haven’t gotten over the first hurdle yet however, which is bringing up the amount of content to a level which can reliably retain viewers. If the kickstarter is successful this will be far easier to do.