HITS

Like many people, quarantine hasn’t been kind to my beltline. Pre-COVID-19, one of my favorite indulgences was when I would visit sets every two weeks, stocked up with the very best chocolate chip cookies to shower our productions with, as we enthralled them in data mining to develop our AI models.

Of course, that is not the only thing I miss about visiting sets regularly, and while I can’t go on-site right now, given pandemic restrictions, it’s impossible not to feel the change that has taken shape since COVID-19. In a matter of weeks, production operations advanced maybe five years as the pandemic made it critical for productions to deliver assets by using digital asset management workflows.

THE PAPERLESS PRINCIPLE
Even before COVID-19, the mission was always to go paperless and enable production teams to avoid seemingly ubiquitous challenges facing a document-intensive industry — inefficient workflows, disjointed collaboration, schedule delays, cost overruns and more. Lacking any integration across applications, studios and production companies struggled with analyzing their data because it was spread across a variety of production applications and paper.

Instead, they spent lots of time downloading files and joining them in different systems, or settling for solutions that deliver insights on only one of those data sources at a time.

This all became further magnified in the rapid shift to remote working.

INTEROPERABILITY
Productions are now aiming for internal simplicity to empower agility and collaboration. Crews expect simplicity from the applications they interact with, they want zero friction, instant action and streamlined processes they can trust.

Incorporated into a studio’s architecture, it simplifies processes and decision making and revolutionizes logistics and budgeting.

The digital wave ushers in the era of interoperability.

With productions going completely digital, siloes get connected and studios centralize operations, where metadata is captured in relationship to the story and the schedule process. Automating the management of script and production operations logic, so studios can budget better off what they have done.

ECONOMIES OF SCALE
An integrated platform, combining cloud, data and AI/ML, powering productions to generate actionable insights, enabling workflows that are faster and smarter than before. A connected supply chain for studios, where the force of data expands exponentially when it is analyzed and correlated against other data.

A knowledge integration platform, a central, searchable and secure hub that connects production data wherever it resides and makes it easier and faster to produce content.

This allows studios to systematize standard operating procedures for consistent media and metadata nomenclature, hierarchy and storage interfaces, where we can define what is the same for every production (scripts, production notes, video files, audio files etc.) and where they can be found in the cloud.

These standardized building blocks coupled with a platform layer enables the best of both worlds: economies of scale from consistency, and freedom and creativity for each production. By leveraging a platform, studios can ensure that any number of applications, tools, bots and other software will synthesize and revolutionize operations processes.

PAPERLESS FUTURE
When the pandemic hit, we all bought toilet paper and scratched our heads. Months later, with a second wave upon us, we raced back to liquidate those shelves again. For many years, production operations were driven by paper processes, and any step forward towards efficiency was proceeded with two steps back.

Production has finally broken the habit, the distributed workforce coupled with digital implementations (time cards, E-Signature, Slack/Asana, webforms, etc.) across operations solidifying platform agnostic architecture.

A central, data-rich hub, forecasting production schedule strategies, tax credits, logistics, labor, and being resilient to whatever disruptions lie ahead, by keeping everyone connected.

* By Gad Tisch, Founder, CEO, Croogloo

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