Options so far with opportunities and challenges
As a movie professional, whether a make-up artist, hair stylist or costumer, is of critical importance to have a good management of scene continuities. Except for a few tools that allow storing this information in a computer system, there is the good old three-ring binder that is the most loyal tool. We're humans, if we touch it it's real, otherwise, stored on a phone, or on a computer, it's "somewhere" but does it really exist? Yet the three-ring binder comes with it's own challenges, mostly about having only one of them, only in a single place at one time and with very few options of keeping it safe from unwanted eyes. When it's not a three-ringer it's something of sorts anyways, a photo album with printed photos, a book with written notes, or maybe even worse, one of the online social networks communication tools. It's all these needs and problems that fed the idea of SceneMatch and the solution it provides.
How SceneMatch comes into play and what's offering
Software applications these days solve all sorts of problems and when they take advantage of the cloud, they offer a great experience for collaboration. SceneMatch is focused on bringing together all movie professionals and store, secure and expose necessary information when needed. Built with security as a major focus, only authorized members of each production are allowed (or disallowed) to post information like photos, general notes, character detailed information and make it available to others in the team no matter how far away are them. Regardless of where you are, or even three months later on another continent, anyone that is authorized to see or modify the information can do it.
Any movie is based on a script, so if you have it, SceneMatch would build a structure of scenes, characters, locations and allow you to refine each screen description and place in the movie timeline, and this would conclude your production setup within SceneMatch. Next step would be to configure your team, invite all the members, whether they're make-up department, hair styling or costumers. Regardless of their department, they can receive a role that would allow them to manage entire production, and you only need to grant this to the most important people, or be able to edit production structure. While few of the invitees will be managers, most of them would receive the collaborate or subscribe roles, while the former would allow them to post photos and notes attached to characters for look description, the latter would only allow members to view whatever the others posted. This grants you a way to allow access to information, but control who is able to contribute.
With a production details configured correctly, you can start grouping character scenes into continuities. SceneMatch will present this information in a timeline view to allow quick access to previously filmed scenes where you can review and match the look of each character. Whenever filming a scene, you can quickly attach images to that scene for each character, just like posting on your favorite social networking application. Notes explaining what tools or techniques were used can be quickly added, again, to show up later on the continuity timeline view.
Information managed by SceneMatch is all stored outside your device, but that doesn't mean it's not protected and secured, as mentioned above, there's a whole level of roles to allow protecting the information and giving access to it in a controlled manner. Cloud however allows for a great collaborative experience, whether you're using a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop, you have access to the same data, based on the same authorization rules.
It’s critical for a successful production to have its continuity information tracked correctly, so that makes it part of the movie professional’s job to do it efficiently. Making this part of their job easier is what SceneMatch strives to do. Spending as little time with this application is a key indicator and that means posting information should be fast, finding it should be even faster to let you focus on your job, not on using yet another application.
Conclusions and what's to come
While holding the information in your hand is great, it does come with a great deal of shortcomings as we've seen, either being a single copy, either not being secured or destructible or easy to steal. Software offers a great answer to most of the problems we are challenged with daily, moreover, cloud enhances collaboration to a new level, offering storage, security, redundancy and availability. SceneMatch leverages all of that into a single, very focused and easy to use application.
Why not give it a try now. It's free to test, play with, see what it offers and how easy it is to get rid of prints, notes on books, sharing information on chat apps and social services.
Registration to SceneMatch.pro is free for anyone that wishes to test the application.
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