How I organize a production, one project at a time
A collection of the tools, documents and workflows behind four university and extracurricular productions — from setting up ShotGrid from scratch to the weekly notes that kept a team aligned.
Production Management & Pipeline · Final Degree Project
Learning ShotGrid, Running a Production
With Giants, I wanted to bring the production department closer to real industry standards, so I started learning ShotGrid from scratch over the summer. By the start of the course, I had everything set up to kick off the production phase. The project is now in early production, working through Layout and the first CG assets - and ShotGrid lets the whole team see in real time how things are progressing, what tasks are pending, and access the latest version of anything with a single click.
Sequences, Shots, Assets and Steps, all connected
Before anything else, I created the pipeline steps for both shots and assets, which later became the foundation for the whole pipeline. With that in place, I built task templates for shots, hero assets, environments and background assets, so each one comes fully set up with a single click.
The goal was to give our small team of nine everything they needed without falling into an overly complex pipeline packed with tasks to complete. Finding the right balance between complexity and simplicity is what shaped the task templates for each asset type.
Knowing who's in the studio, and when
Every team member logs which days they'll be working from the La Salle studio, alongside key dates like weekly supervisor meetings, so availability is never a guessing game.
Building a Discord Server, in place of Slack
I set up and structured the whole server myself, with dedicated categories for collaborators and supervisors and a welcome channel for anyone joining the project. One place for the mentor, the supervisors and the team to talk and stay in the loop.
When the tool doesn't fit, adapt it
ShotGrid's native project timeline feature didn't quite work for how the team needed to plan, so I moved it into a spreadsheet built on my usual template, adapted to mirror the same pipeline steps used in ShotGrid, so both documents still speak the same language.
A webhook built to keep the team updated
Rather than relying on everyone checking ShotGrid, I set up a webhook that translates task status changes into readable Discord embed messages, with a direct link back to the asset. It's a small piece of custom tool that brings the pipeline to where the team is already talking.
Production Assistant · Extracurricular Project
A Schedule Template Built to Last
Flight was an extracurricular project, and I was in charge of creating the scheduling spreadsheet. I looked for examples of real production schedules online and built a template from them — one I still use today for other projects whenever I need a spreadsheet for scheduling or task management. This schedule, organized by department (script, storyboard, music, concept art), was the document that gave Flight's preproduction its shape.
From Meeting Room to Every Department
In Flight, I was also in charge of collecting all the notes from directors and the rest of the team, organizing them by asset and area, and sending them out to the leads and artists of every department. I usually put together a cleaner version, along with short meeting briefs.
Production & USD Pipeline · Second Year Short Film
Keeping the story on track
In Overdrive, we decided to focus more on the narrative and the edit of the film, so my job was to make sure the story team and the edit team worked closely together as a single department. We used spreadsheets and scripts to keep everyone's work aligned.
Lightweight tracking for a short timeline
A simple spreadsheet tracking each asset's status by department and by person, the lighter counterpart to Giants full ShotGrid setup, and a good example of scaling the tool to the size of the project.
From Maya to a Full USD Pipeline
Overdrive was the first project where I worked with a USD / Solaris / Houdini pipeline, coming from a more classic Maya reference workflow on previous projects. Adapting to it — and helping the team adapt to it — was one of the main challenges here.
From storyboard to final render
This was one of the final shots delivered by the team, and we were incredibly happy with how it came together after all the work everyone put into it.
Fun fact: I was in charge of the character surfacing, lighting and comp on this shot!
Challenges
Challenges completed in the past projects that help me grow as a Producer.
Learning to write notes that make sense outside the room. Turning raw feedback from Giants supervisor meetings into clear, prioritized action items every department can pick up on their own.
Adapting from a classic Maya pipeline to USD / Solaris / Houdini on Overdrive, taught me how much a production depends on staying self-driven when the tools change under you.
Building a full production database in ShotGrid from scratch and connecting it to Tik Manager — tracking every asset, shot and department's inputs and outputs in one place, so our small-scale setup runs a step closer to how a real studio operates.
Beyond taking notes, preparing the weeklies meant building the agenda, and creating and maintaining playlists in ShotGrid for every supervisor review. Making sure each session started ready and nothing got lost between meetings.