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Croogloo: Connecting Film, TV Production Operations

Combining the best practices of supply chain science, tech, and production operations, Montreal-based Croogloo has a bold goal: help Studios and Crew cut production days, using data tools to provide insights throughout a production’s lifecycle.

Founded in 2017, Croogloo’s cloud suite platform runs the gamut when evaluating Film and Television production operations, offering production management, analytics, predictive forecasting, and financial modeling in real time. Bringing deep backgrounds in supply chain management, film production, and data science, their founder launched the company after seeing a lack of operational intelligence among applications being used by studios and crew.

“Media has seen tremendous technological advances and achievements in storytelling over the last 10 years,” according to Gad Tisch, founder and president of the company. “Major challenges and inherent inefficiencies in production operations threaten to limit the ability to continue innovation, reduce production time and expand output,” he told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA).

For one thing, “today’s television and feature production workflows make it incredibly challenging to preserve and manage data throughout the production lifecycle,” he pointed out.

Specifically, production operations are “stymied by incompatible applications and non-standardized systems generating hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper every production,” he said. “The market is filled with solutions but no remedy to paper processes,” he noted, adding: “each department and business group has a system to work with, but nothing connecting all these applications for production operations, which is why we still have as much paper on a set today as we did before smartphones, tablets, and laptops.”

However, Croogloo represents the “first platform to integrate applications, logistics, and resources across the production supply chain,” according to Tisch.

Croogloo unifies multiple silos of production data sources from systems across the production, centralizing challenging production workflows and disparate systems for data management and curation. This reduces studio and crew time spent on low-value, repetitive tasks, so organizations can instead focus on generating actionable insights for operations.

Productions have been taking advantage of the application programming interfaces (APIs) and automations being offered by Croogloo, “making it easier for them to transfer data from multiple sources instantly, synthesizing operations to simplify data access and collaboration,” Tisch said.

“By focusing on data, we are able to demonstrate to studios and crews how much insight and transparency they have over their operations,” he said, noting Croogloo’s platform triggers “sustainable production practices that generate tax credits.”

Croogloo creates an operational supply chain for productions, providing a platform to connect studios and crew to their production data. In the process, he explained, it’s “replacing mundane, repetitive production tasks to be accomplished through artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced tools, automation, bots, and processes.”

The platform makes the most of the capabilities of machine learning (ML) and AI, to help compliment how the industry makes decisions. That technology allows Croogloo’s platform to recognize patterns early in the process and provide quick, efficient and methodical guidance at any stage.

Ongoing Challenges

“The main challenge for any software is trust,” Tisch went on to say, adding: “By integrating to the tools studios and crew use, adopting a new platform was not scary and we were able to grow rapidly. Today we are working with major studios to spread implementation to cut production waste and generate tax credits for efficient operations.”

“Tools will continue to flood the market,” he predicted. But Croogloo “will be the force that connects them all, synthesizing assets and resources for data-driven productions,” he said.

Croogloo’s Growing Client List

Since launching in 2017, Croogloo has been on a meteoric rise, already working with major studios like Paramount, CBS, and Netflix.

The company was recently implemented by a studio on an episodic production, to streamline manual data entry and reporting. With PDF files and hand-written documents, Croogloo generated daily production reports and financials, “eliminating several hours per day of tedious data wrangling to seconds,” he said.

Taking Advantage of AI and ML, While Eyeing the Future

Rather than predict where AI will have the biggest impact in the production of media, Croogloo is “focused on creating an environment that enables those AI tools to work most effectively” as they expand to more AI- and ML-enabled production processes, he noted.

So, what’s next for Croogloo? Digging deeper with studios and crew to generate tax credits for their projects and pursuing opportunities with commercial productions. “Croogloo adds data analysis to production operations, facilitating decision making and generating sustainability,” Tisch said.