Startup Idea: Innovative Production Report Creation & Management Solution for Film & TV Industry
I am an Assistant Production Coordinator in the film & TV industry. I do freelance work in the production offices of various movies and TV shows as they prep, shoot, and wrap. We deal with a lot of file/schedule distribution and tracking various things such as: how many scenes we have shot, how much film we have used, how many terabytes of data we've recorded, how many hours the cast and crew work each day.
All of this information is compiled into a document called a Production Report that serves as a daily record of every scene we shot that day, what special equipment was used, how much footage was recorded, which cast and crew worked and for how long, etc. We edit, correct, and then distribute this Production Report to the studio each day. Currently, this document is created and edited in Excel. This system is clunky and cumbersome, as there is a lot of data to sort through, and multiple people need to make edits to the document. This process takes up much of the day, as we have to correct information in the Excel document, send it to another employee so they can make their changes, and so on.
The ideal solution would be some sort of shared database (perhaps like FileMaker Pro) with a specific Production Report template. This could be hosted on a server or otherwise shared between multiple employees and departments. That way, all of us could update our specific information at the same time, instead of having to wait for the others. Ideally, the studio would also be able to view this database template in real time, but would not be allowed to edit. That way, they could glean whatever information they need in real time.
I hope this is a specific enough example. The film and TV industry is unfortunately stubborn when it comes to adopting new methods, but I am hoping to see a more streamlined process for creating, editing, and distributing this document, as it tracks almost everything we shoot each day, and is therefore one of the most important and referenced documents on each movie or TV show. Thank you. I have used FileMaker Pro to create databases in and utilize templates for other purposes, but not for this. I believe that FileMaker Pro may offer something similar to what I envision, but the software is clunky, not intuitive, and difficult to host so that multiple employees can access the database.
For now, we simply use one Excel spreadsheet that gets passed around to different employees. Each employee makes the changes they need to make, and passes it back. This is an extremely inefficient way to manage this document.