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Production Documents
Hello everyone! Thank you for deciding to take a look at one of the most unspoken parts of the entertainment industry, documentation. Schedules, budgets, task trackers, asset lists, team rosters, project goals, milestone deadlines, and much more are what hold projects together. This is especially true in the complex pipelines in animation and video game development. So, sit back as I take you through some of the documents that helped Project O-O
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Team Expectations
Project Onboarding Overview
First, is a quick overview of Project O-O initial plan as we were heading into the Spring of 2022. It was part of our onboarding process as we were doing heavy recruitment in the Fall of 2021. It is important that everyone knows the current status of the project and what we were trying to accomplish by May. Once we start the second half of this animated short another document like this will be created to help new members of the team.
When working with so many people chaos can easily ensue without establishing the project's structure or systems of how each role will function. Of course, it is one thing to tell everyone how things are going to work, but writing it all out sets it in stone and it gives people something to reference until it becomes routine.
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Weekly Milestones
Our Pre-Production started in the middle of January and was set to finish by the first week of May. So as much as we were trying to stick to a more agile management style, this waterfall list of tasks was good to have to ensure we were not losing sight of our main goals. This was also a great point of reference to track where all our deliverables should be within the 4 month time period. Not only was this helpful for management, but also for all team members to properly plan for the upcoming workload of each week.
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Team Roster
As simple as a team roster can be it can really help small projects like O-O. This is because in the beginning we only had a few people, but we slowly grew to 15 with more to come. We are all working remotely so remembering someone's name, what their role is, and how to contact them can be easily taken for granted until you don't remember.
This way everyone has an easy way to look this type of information up if they have a question or need help with a certain task. It's also a way for the team to network among the team for future projects of their own.
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Master Schedule
There it is in all its glory, the master project schedule. This document tracked all the assets we needed, what artist would be assigned to each task, priority levels, asset status, completion times, and all over our 16 week timeline. This document was created in excel and imported into google sheets for collaboration between the project managers. We decided not to use ShotGrid because first of all ShotGrid is not free and even with our school account many of our team members are alumni so they did not have access.
If you are an aspiring project manager, I suggest you learn as much as you can about Excel, ShotGrid, Jira, Trello, Confluence, and any other management software. They are all powerful software that go deep into how you track your project. As one producer once said "Learn to adapt and use what software works best for the team, not what you like the most."
If you would like to view the full document you can download it above.
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