Part 4: The Timeline Training Video (10:11)
https://vimeo.com/671172714
Transcript
We are now in the Timeline screen.
The purpose of the Timeline is to collect and organize every piece of schedule and logistics information related to your projects. The communication of this information to other people is taken care of in a different location, the Production Books Screen.
The timeline is comprised of events. An event can literally be anything. Due dates and deadlines, performances, rehearsals, costume fittings, load-ins, meal breaks, travel info, etc. The timeline is also built to be flexible, so you can start with very high-level info in early planning phases and get to the granular stuff as time goes on.
You can see that there is a dropdown at the top of the screen. It is currently showing us all of the events across all of our projects. If you click on this you will get a dropdown of the different Active and Draft projects that you have created and can easily narrow your view. This allows you to focus on one or more projects at a time and can be very helpful in seeing how different projects you are working on interact with one another. You can select the Project or Projects you want to see and select okay to execute the selector.
Next to it, you'll see the Timezone dropdown, which shows you the timezone you are currently viewing the timeline in. If you change this, it will not change the actual times for your events, just your view into them.
You can see in the table that Propared has automatically created for us our first events. This includes the name of the show, and is using the information that we entered when we created this project in the Projects Screen.
This event is great as a place-holder for the show until you have more information to add. Many people delete this event after they get some more info in.
You’ll also notice that we are currently filtering from today through the next year. I can update this time filter at any point, or I can press the Reset Filters button to default this date filter back to all time. We do this to help show you upcoming information that may be more relevant that events that have happened in the past.
So, now let's add some more events to the Timeline! For this lets just look at one show at a time. I'm going to select just The Lion Queen.
To add a new event, you'll use the same button in the upper right hand corner. "New Event"
If you are focused on just one project Propared will automatically select that project for your event, however if you wanted to add it to another project you could always change it.
So, the best way to start is to just put in the first thing that comes to mind that you have to deal with. There are no wrong events.
So, I’m going to start by creating our first Rehearsal. You can add whatever you want. The only required field here is to select the project and give the event a name. That way you can start with the information you know and add more information later as you learn more. I’ll name this event Rehearsal. I’m going to add a date for it and a time, June 13: 10am - 2pm
Every event can have a Status. None, Confirmed or Tentative. We'll look at this later in the Production Books Screen, but this can be used to filter your events to keep you focused on what is completed, and what still needs attention.
Categories and Departments are tags that you can use to filter your Timeline in specific ways! Categories and Departments are completely customizable so they can be very specific to your organization’s needs. These tags are going to be used later to help define the actual schedules you are going to be sending to people which we’ll talk about when we get to the Production Books Screen. We’re going to add a Category called rehearsal because I know that later I’m going to want to create a rehearsal schedule.
Details is a freeform text field. Details will appear on Schedules and Calendars which we’ll look at later. This can be used for many different things. Rehearse Act 1
Highlighting an event simply bolds it in your timeline and can be used to draw attention to something in particular.
Next we come to the Team section. Anytime you see the word Team, it is going to reference people, organizations and locations.
If you know the location for the rehearsal you can add it in by selecting the name into the Location field. These locations are being pulled from our Contacts for Locations. If you want to use a location that hasn’t been created, you can create one on the fly by clicking Add a Location or Space. When you save, this will create a new contact record for it in the Contacts Screen. However, we’re going to use the “Rehearsal Hall”.
Propared can help you identify conflicts between different locations from across all of your projects. If this toggle is on, Propared will notify you if there is already an event in this location during this time. We will still let you double book things because we know it's possible to be doing multiple things in the same space at the same time. If you know that this event should not flag this as a conflict, you can turn this toggle off. You can also filter in the Status bar by conflicts, to see all of the events with current location conflicts.
Next you can add people that you specifically want to associate with this event. Let’s, add a couple of our cast members that aren't currently in our contacts.
Charles Feng
Jessie Schwartz
Just like with the Location field as you type it’s going to look through your contacts and suggest people. If it doesn’t find the person, you can add them on the fly by clicking “Add a Contact” or "Add an Organization"
So here in the table you see the event we created for the rehearsal!
Let’s go ahead and create one more rehearsal.
Rehearsal 2
June 14, 10am -2pm (4 hours button, and must be a Tuesday)
So let’s look at some ways to create lots of events in a hurry.
For this example, we have 2 weeks of rehearsals. Monday-Friday.
Instead of creating a new event from scratch, we’re going to clone an existing one. By selecting the checkbox next to the rehearsal and clicking the clone button in the More Menu, we are making an identical copy. You can select which project you'd like to clone this into. We are going to clone it into the same project, Lion Queen. Now, if we want to make an identical copy with the same date and time, we'll just click Clone. We could clone and shift this event though by adding in a date. So if we have a rehearsal on Wednesday as well, we can just add it.
Now we have rehearsals on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. To create Thursday and Friday even faster, we’re going to select both Tuesday and Wednesday by using the checkboxes. Then click Clone to duplicate both of them! Now all we have to do is add in the first date for these Rehearsals.
Now we have a whole week’s worth of Rehearsals. To create the next week’s all we have to do it select all five rehearsals, clone, and add the first date for the week.
Now we have 2 weeks of rehearsals!
So, lets say something changes....
We could edit an event and change the date, but instead we’re going to click the shift timeframe button. This allows us to move events backwards or forwards based on any number of years, months, weeks, days, hours, or minutes. This works as well for big chunks of events and can make things easy if say and entire show needs to move by a month.
Now let’s quickly create a couple of other events just to round things out a bit.
Let’s say we have a designer deadline for the Light Plot. Go ahead and create a new event. We can name it Light Plot Due and give it a due date. June 17
Since this is a deadline we can leave the Time and Location fields blank.
Let’s tag this even with the dept. Lighting and the category Deadlines. Under Team you might add the Lighting Designer who is responsible for drafting the plot.
Jose Rosello
(create new event)
Let’s also add a Production Meeting in the Production Office will which will be a new space that we’ll create here.
Production Meeting
June 22 at 2pm - 3pm
Production Office (new space)
Our timeline is starting to get filled out nicely. Once you have everything in here, your timeline is going to get pretty long. Fortunately, from this screen we can also filter and group events to look at smaller subsets of information.
Filtering and grouping work exactly the same as in the Projects screen.
Remember if we are looking at multiple projects in the timeline at the same time, the filters and groupings will work across them all. Also, in some filters, such as the Dates filter, there are shortcuts created to get to common items, such as show me what's happening the next 7 days
You can also select which visible columns are shown in the table through the columns menu.
One more thing in the detail panel, you will see a section below the Team called Crew Management. We'll go into this more in depth in another video but this section is used to identify and budget your labour needs and book your crew. Any Bookings you add in the crew management section will also be visible in the tab at the top called Crew Management. This allows you to manage empty booking slots from across your events and projects together.
In the More Dropdown you can also import events from spreadsheets. For importing, Propared has a template you can use to ensure everything imports accurately on the support site. help.propared.com.
That’s the basics of event creation and editing. Now let’s head on over to the Production Books Screen and share some information with our teams!
