The Power of Collaboration using ShotGrid

SASWAT SAHOO: Hello, everyone. It's my pleasure to be here today. Thank you all for this opportunity to share and learn with the community. My name is Saswat Sahoo. I'm the director of production technology at 88 pictures. Back in the days, I had the good fortune of working with some wonderful organizations like R & H and DreamWorks. In my current role, I lead the production engineering and technical directors team at 88 pictures. In this session, I'll be speaking about my experience of using Shotgrid. And I hope I'll be able to give some insights that you could use. But before I begin, let me show you the work we do at 88 pictures. Let's have a look at a company [INAUDIBLE]. Here we go.

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- Arthur has a sick sense of humor. Steals my homelands and says I'm trespassing there. Now trolls are forbidden.

- It wasn't real. It wasn't real.

- Bellroc and Skrael believe humanity is lost beyond correction. Now they wish to end it all. They search for the Genesis Seals.

- Welcome back to the 21st century.

- Sweet, sweet pollution.

- You're not the only one with magic. I am the defying Duke Domzalski.

- Right. [COUGHS]

- I guess the [INAUDIBLE]

- Humans crave war. General, tell the droves of trolls, it's time to pick a side.

- [CHARACTER SCREAMS]

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- I'll try to make you proud. No. No, you can't go. No, please I'm not ready.

- I can't believe he's gone.

- The [INAUDIBLE]

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SASWAT SAHOO: Wasn't that wonderful. So we have been in the business for five years now. We started with a handful of artists in Mumbai, and have come a long way since then. If there's one thing that underlines our story, it's growth. It's consistent, steady growth towards our target of working on world class feature films. We started with three very clear goals. We wanted to work on projects which are really high end and demand the highest level of quality. So creative satisfaction was priority number one. The second one is that we wanted to work in a culture that focused on people. Where work relationships and work-life balance are really valued. And the third most important point is that we'll use the best of the tools that we can afford to do the job most efficiently.

So it was pretty crystal clear from the beginning that technology is to play a major role in our story. Our lofty goals had a very humble start. These are a few pictures of the early days, and like any other self-respecting techie, I am nowhere to be seen in these pictures. Here are some more moments of joy before we actually hit the ground running in production. The first project that we worked on was DreamWorks' Trollhunters series, which was to be aired on Netflix. So it was the setting for a perfect storm. There's a high profile client, there's a challenging project, and a pipeline which is still under development, and an overeager production team that wants to impress the client. And we weren't even done with posing with the keyboards yet.

So one of the first decisions that we took was to bring in Shotgun, now called Shotgrid, pretty early on in the production. In all of our collective wisdom, we were pretty clear that we can't really build a full fledged production management system in that time frame, and even of the caliber that this project demanded. So I would rather focus my precious few developers on the content creation side of things, and just leave the production management to who does it best, which is Shotgrid. So we took a couple of weeks to get everything ready for the start of production, and we did it. From that point on, Shotgrid has been an integral part of our ecosystem. And its contribution to our success has been really substantial.

Since then we have come a long way. Today, we have a 300 artist family. We have delivered on about 30 art projects for 19 happy clients, and currently we are working on eight active shows. So how exactly does Shotgrid help us in growing and staying efficient. By how, I don't mean to explain the exact setup or techniques or stuff like that, instead what I intend to dwell upon in this session are the few key areas where we found Shotgrid has really brought in tremendous value. Anyone familiar with Shotgrid knows how well it handles most aspects of project management. At 88, Shotgrid actually touches most aspects and all the people involved in production in various degrees. So be it the producers, the production managers, the artists, supervisors, TDs, developers, IT, HR, management. Shotgrid is useful to everyone in some way or other.

Here are some of the most heavily used applications that drive the day to day activities of the project. Currently, we are actually working on on boarding all our workstations and other idea assets on Shotgrid. Where they can be linked to the artist using them and the task that they're used for. This is the beauty of Shotgrid. It's really like a framework with lots of basic building blocks that you could use to model a digital version of your production. This digital version reflects the exact state of activities of the studio in near real time. At any point of time you could actually take a snapshot of it and dig into the data to find whatever answers you are looking for. Or you could choose not to go crazy with the development team and just make use of the ready-made templates and out of the box features and you will still be able to achieve drastic efficiency gain in all aspects. That's the part of Shotgrid.

Some of the outcomes using Shotgrid that I think helped 88 pictures the most are the ones that not many notice. Project setup. Getting our first Trollhunters project, we actually got a couple of weeks to start. And I think that is the most amount of time we have ever got. The average number of days we get to set the project is actually one week, out of which most of the days are actually spent in confirming the technical specs from the client. Being a [INAUDIBLE] studio, we don't really have the luxury of using one standard pipeline for all our projects. We might have to share work with other vendors. Sometimes the client would want to collaborate.

So every new project comes with a different set of requirements and specifications. Right from the software packages that have to be used, the file formats, even sometimes the naming conventions and folder structures need to be changed, and of course the specifications of the deliverables, those always change. So we have to be extremely flexible to allow for all this project specific considerations. If there's one thing that Shotgrid is really good at, its flexibility. If you understand it well you can pretty much model and configure the project in any way you need. So we usually start off with one of the ready-made templates and work our way from there.

Speed and flexibility are what Shotgrid has really helped us immensely with. Special mention to linked and connection entities. These two features have been so useful for us to establish relationships between other entities. So when we want to support integrate data models like for example, the connection between a shot and the asset instances that is used in the shots, or maybe we want to model a parent-child relationship between an asset and its variant. This is all doable in Shotgrid. Shotgrid is where all our production data resides. It's practically a production database. So it's obvious that our internal systems would integrate very tightly with it in order to feed data, as well as to collect data from it.

Shotgrid actually does a very good job at supporting such kind of integrations. It's Python and the REST APIs are very powerful. One example of a system that interacts closely with Shotgrid in our 88 pictures pipeline is publishing and subscription system. So publishing is the collective act of generating output data set and recording, and even in some cases actually uploading it to Shotgrid. And the subscription system keeps track of the consumer side of things. We record all these relationships and dependencies in Shotgrid. And that has really helped us a lot. One thing to keep in mind when designing such tight integrations is that it's better to have some sort of fallback mechanism so that in case of any outages or things like that, you could at least be able to queue up the transactions for deferred evaluation.

Next one is automation. Now everybody loves the word "automatically." Everyone is happy when things happen automatically. When the supervisor approves to take, the media file automatically gets copied to the upload folder. And an Excel file is updated. And the task status is updated to awaiting feedback. When this happens, every evening for hundreds of shots, you can be pretty sure that the production folks are super, super happy. Automation is where Shotgrid again excels. It has a very good event trigger mechanism, and it has web hooks and also action menu items that support this kind of automation. And we make use of it a lot.

In-context reviews. Our supervisors, they like to get into the zone and focus on what they're reviewing. And during this process the worst distraction that can happen is when they have to search for information that they need during this process. Information like what are the previous takes, what were the notes given, what are the caveats, things like that. The reviews are one of the most important creative functions that happens in the studio, with zero margin of error.

Shotgrid actually does this very well. The way it integrates the very powerful media player, which is RV, and with the screening room, its combination allows for playing high resolution color accurate media with very easy access to all the contextual data that the supervisor might need. And what's more, the supervisor can actually change the status. He can type in his notes. He can save his draw overs right there all by himself. So right there you know we gained so much in efficiency. The communication now is directly between the creatives, between the supervisor and the artist without any intervention from the production folks.

Next one is issues tracking. So whether we like it or not, there will always be issues, technical issues, creative issues, production issues, or just stupid mistakes that people do sometimes. So there are two aspects to issues. One is that these issues actually eat up the artist's creative time, and therefore, they need to be accounted and compensated for. And there's another set of people who actually work on these issues. So it's a task for them. Usually those are the TDs. And like any other tasks, these tasks also need to be tracked.

Now, Shotgrid tickets are a great way to achieve both these functions. The way we do it is we have our own tools inside of the DCCs where the artists are working. And they can submit a ticket right from inside the resources. And we get all the context information from there and from their file. We will know which file they're working on, which shot number, which task, whether it's animation, [INAUDIBLE], whatever task it is. And so we'll be able to generate a ticket and link it to the exact task where that problem has happened. So this helps production also know that there is something blocking that task. And obviously, when the TD takes up the ticket and starts working on it, he logs time in the ticket. So we know exactly how much time of the artist was wasted on the ticket, and therefore, he needs to be compensated for.

The power of visualization. Now animation people are very bad in reading text. And when you put text into tiny cells, they might even be imagining [INAUDIBLE] at that point of time. But thankfully Shotgrid comes with a pretty impressive framework to visualize data. It's very aptly called the canvas. This is where production folks show their creativity. Canvas provides a lot of powerful widgets that can be used to design and the layout the report pages. The most popular widget is, of course, the graph widget. There's nothing like graphs to reveal the trends and progressions, and it's a much loved tool in our studio.

Thriving ecosystem. The fact that Shotgrid has this massive ecosystem around it really is beneficial for us. The community of Shotgrid users is a much vocal and outspoken one. And the amount of support, learning, and feedback that it provides is really valuable. On the product side, there is continuous innovation happening, and the product is really well maintained. That is really assuring for us. The level of support has always been excellent. The amount of high quality learning and training resources that is out there on YouTube and Shotgrid's own training portal is really empowering. And it has been a great help to us to get on Shotgrid ecosystem pretty easily.

Today Shotgrid is like the industry standard of standard project management software for animation and VFX industry. The fact that most of our clients and vendors also use it makes it immensely easy for us to collaborate with them. It certainly helps us to communicate better when the other parties understand the production vocabulary that Shotgrid has kind of standardized. Over time I imagine certain workflows and templates will go on to become the industry standard, which will level the playing field for all studios.

Scale and performance. Five years back there was always this slight hesitation when it came to adopting any cloud solution. It wasn't much a reflection of that product themselves, but rather it was about whether do we have enough good internet connectivity to be able to use the product seamlessly. Of course a lot has improved since then. Now everything is moving towards cloud and the level of confidence is very high about cloud products. So we have scaled from one project to eight projects. running parallel. From 10 artists to 300 artists today.

Our pipeline system, artist production, performs hundreds of reads and write transactions every second to the Shotgrid service. During peak hours, which is in the evenings, there will be hundreds of versions getting uploaded to the servers. Shotgrid has been reliably performant for us all this time. I can't really recollect any instance where any service degradation has impacted us severely. So now that Shotgrid maintains a data center in India also that has really improved upload times for us.

So overall the Shotgrid has been a very consistent, reliable, and incredibly useful partner in that growth [INAUDIBLE]. To summarize it all, what Shotgrid has really done for us is it gives us the freedom to do what a creative enterprise is really supposed to do, which is to create art.

I wanted to give a bit of statistics about how we use Shotgrid. So to circle back on the point I was making about performance of Shotgrid. I think we do a decent amount of transactions every day. And at this scale, Shotgrid's performance has been pretty impressive. That's 600 versions and 1,000 file publishes generated on an average every day. And yet other cumulative numbers that explain how much we have used Shotgrid till now, quite big numbers over there.

But that brings me to the end of my talk. I hope you liked it. And I hope you will find some insight that might be useful to you. Thank you for listening to me. Stay safe and have a good day.