Producer Journal: Workflow
Since Tabletop News was successfully funded via Kickstarter, so much work has been happening behind the scenes. Much of the work is invisible to the public, and since this was a crowdfunded project, we want to make it visible. Tabletop News is, after all, your show. Today we’ll shine a light on the big logistical hurdle we’re putting all our efforts into working out, The Workflow.
Let’s start with the premise.
Tabletop News is a weekly show about current events in the tabletop gaming space. Stories must be timely and relevant, so the research and writing phase is the first logistical hurdle. News is happening organically in real-time, so we have a few needles to thread here. The big one is getting a 15(ish) minute script written based on well-researched stories and being prepared at a moment’s notice to tear that script apart and completely rewrite it up to the moment the show films.
For example, let’s say we film on Monday with a plan to release on Tuesday. We’re all set to roll cameras Monday morning. Then we get Google Alerts that a new OGL fiasco has surfaced…changing the entire foundation of the tabletop gaming industry forever. People would rightly expect their Tuesday edition of Tabletop News to feature that story, and that means our meticulously plotted shoot day undergoes significant changes without warning.
“Okay, so you change the shooting schedule slightly; who cares? Surely it’s easy enough to shuffle the script and move on with your day?”
You might say, and you’d be partly right. We have a plan for writing on the fly and making the day work, but it gets complicated now that we plan to release our Monday episode on Tuesday morning. Tabletop News is a polished, professionally produced show. It’s vital to have time to edit the show and add music and sound design. Each episode must also be cut into individual segment clips. We have 12 hours to accomplish all this.
Let’s say everything runs smoothly, and our shoot day lasts until 5 p.m. Editors need all the footage in hand to start cutting together a finished product. We can’t send the editors a file remotely because the data transfer could take 6 hours, so instead, a runner must take physical hard drives to the editing team. We have a minimum of two editors working because every minute counts here. Those editors are probably freelancers who work from their individual homes. It’s Los Angeles; there’s undoubtedly an unholy amount of traffic. The types of questions we must anticipate and answer are whether we need two runners to save time and whether the budget allows for two runners.
Receiving finished episodes, checking them, and distributing them.
It’s now Tuesday morning, and our editors have an episode. We must watch it and ensure nothing is wrong (some things will always be wrong). We have to fix those things, export the files, then upload the files. What if an export takes two hours? What if during that two-hour export, the computer crashes (it will), and we have to start the two-hour process over again? It looks like the upload will take another two hours, and what if it fails (it will)? We told you, our audience, the episode will be released at 11 a.m. Tuesday morning.
The question is, can that actually happen? The answer is probably yes, but only if we spend days meticulously planning exactly how it will happen now, weeks and weeks before we even write the script for episode one. It’s all plans and plans for what to do when the original plans fail, and if we do our job right, you’ll never even notice.
