Part 5: Production Books and Sharing Information Training Video (9:14)
https://vimeo.com/671176267
Transcript
Now, let’s look at Production Books by navigating to the Production Book Screen.
Production Books are the object through which you will share information both internally, and with your talent, crew, designers, upper management, vendors, etc.
Each Production Book creates a simple, shareable webpage that is viewable by anyone who has the link. They are also mobile friendly, and they stay up to date as you make changes in Propared.
CLICK ON PRODUCTION BOOK
Production Books can include different types of information: We currently have Schedules, Team member Contact Lists, Locations lists, Attachments and Requirements. A single webpage can include a combination of this information so you can communicate everything necessary in one simple webpage. These webpages are created by setting up the Filter Criteria for each section.
Let’s take a look at one now.
You’ll notice that you already have a couple of Production Books here waiting for you. When we created our Project in the Projects screen, Propared automatically created a Production Book for each of our projects. These automatically created production books include schedule information pulled from the Timeline and shared in the schedule page. The other pages in the production book are turned off by default in these first production books. Due to the Filter Settings established here, any events you put in the project’s Timeline will appear in this Production Book.
In the Information section for the Production Book you will see the Name of the Production Book, the Project or Projects that are included in it and this URL enabled Toggle switch. The URL below this is the URL you will be sharing with your team. This URL can be disabled at any point by disabling the link. When you click on the link it it will open a new tab in your browser displaying the Schedule in Calendar View.
CLICK ON LINK
Note that we are no longer in Propared and that no login was necessary to access this page. The link for this web page can be copied and shared with anyone you want, and, when they click on it, this is exactly what they will see.
All Production Books are mobile-friendly {Shrink screen to show mobile view}
Anyone viewing a Production Book can also filter it themselves using these drop-down selectors at the top as well as change the schedule layout from a month calendar view to a day calendar view or a list layout.
At the bottom of the webpage, you’ll see a second link that Propared creates which lets you subscribe to this schedule in personal calendar programs like Google, Outlook, and Apple. It’s important to note that when subscribed to a schedule through this link, updates can take a bit longer as we don’t have any control over how quickly third party apps refresh their data. When in doubt using the propared webpage means that you will be completely up to date.
Back in Propared, let’s take a deeper look at the Filter Settings for the Schedule section. We’ll select the Production Book by clicking on the row.
Here is the information for the schedule section. This section establishes which events from your Timelines will show up in your schedule. You’ll see at the top of the page that the Project “Lion Queen” is selected. In the schedule section, this tells Propared to include events from the Lion Queen’s Timeline.
If you want to narrow down the schedule to a smaller subset of events, you can use any of the options below. For instance, we can narrow by only showing events on certain dates. To do that we could select a set of dates or use any of the presets at the bottom of the window. For instance for events in the next 90 days. You could also show events from Today forward, All dates, or Starting on a certain day.
Constraining by dates are great for creating daily or weekly schedules.
You can also narrow by only including events with certain status, Locations, Team Members, Departments or Categories.
For example we could make this just include events in the month of JUNE tagged with the category of deadlines.
Also, since this is no longer a “Full Schedule” it might be wise to change the name so we won’t confuse our viewers.
When you make updates to a Production Books Filter Settings they will automatically update the webpage when that page is refreshed. You can click on the URL near the top of the details panel or we could just go back to the same URL we had open earlier and refresh the browser. The Link doesn’t change. Let’s take a look at it now and see what it looks like!
CLICK TO OPEN PRODUCTION BOOK and refresh
So back in the Production Book Settings, there are a few other options to look at. You can adjust the filter logic from Any to All. When Any is selected events that contain any of the selected tags will show in the schedule. When All is selected only events that contain ALL of the selected tags will appear. Using Any is more inclusive and will probably be used most of the time.
If you have any Crew Management Bookings created you can choose to exclude them as well or only display confirmed Bookings. We’ll look at this more later.
Below that, you’ll see the “Appearance” section. This is where you can decide what you want your schedule to look like.
We currently have 3 views for the schedule layout. Month, Day or List. This field chooses which layout you want the schedule to default to when someone first opens the link, however remember that your viewers can still choose to look at it differently in their webpage.
So, we can also create schedules that are subsets of a Timeline such a performance schedule, tech schedule, load in schedule, etc. As one more example, let’s create a Rehearsal Schedule for Lion Queen from scratch.
We start by clicking the “New Production Book” button. Then let’s give it a name. “Lion Queen – Rehearsal Schedule”. The name of the Filter will be the title that appears at the top of the webpage. Next you’ll choose which projects you want to include. Here I’m going to just select Lion Queen.
Then we make sure the URL is enabled and also that the schedule page is enabled. Now, if you recall, in the Timeline, we tagged all of our rehearsals with the category “Rehearsal”. If we add that tag here, Propared will only display Tasks tagged with “Rehearsal”.
Notice that you can add any other details that you want to filter this schedule including locations, Team Members, and Departments. Since we want all rehearsals regardless of who is there or where it’s happening, we’ll leave the rest of these fields on their defaults.
Under appearance, you can also choose to hide certain columns such as categories as every task in this schedule will have the same category Rehearsal. You can also hide location, notes or team members.
And that’s it!
Now let’s take a look!
Back in Propared, we’re going to create one more Production Book together: a Company Calendar.
For this Production Book, we’ll want to see Tasks from ALL of our projects, not just one. Let’s create a new Production Book and name it “Company Calendar”. Now, in the Projects field, click into it and select “All Projects”.
Now let’s look at it. You’ll now see a project key with all your projects color-coded as your established back in the Projects Screen. The calendar includes Tasks from Lion Queen and Stinky Boots along with any other Projects you create in the future.
Using the “All Projects” tag you can create many different schedules and calendars including venue schedules, individual schedules for your colleagues, department schedules, and daily or weekly schedules for the whole organization.
Now it’s time to look at one more layout option. Below the Layout, you’ll see an option called “Group By”. This lets you further subdivide your schedule by either Location or Project. Let’s group by Location and see what that looks like.
You’ll see that now each week is subdivided by all the available locations and Tasks are sorted accordingly.
Here’s what “Group By Location” looks like in List Layout.
From the Production Books Screen you can also email your Production Book by selecting the checkbox and in the more dropdown, clicking on the Email button. You’ll see a popup window where you can write a subject, easily select team members already apart of this schedule or any additional contacts from your contacts screen. You can choose to use the To field, or the BCC field..When you send this email, it include the link to the webpage.
Lastly, in the more menu, you can export Production Book Schedules to a .CSV, clone Production Books and also delete them.
Remember, you can have as many Production Books as you want, and changing information in Propared will update all of them instantly!
And, if you ever want to disable a production book, you can simply toggle off the Schedule, or the Public Calendar Feeds link.
