Michael Geczi

Building a Unified Platform Through Cloud Technology June 8, 2018 By Cast & Crew Tech Get your head in the cloud. Seriously. The entertainment industry, understandably, is focused on creativity. And to the extent technology – animation or special effects, for instance – can drive the creative vision, it obviously is embraced. However, entertainment production also is underpinned by a slew of business processes that continue to be addressed not much differently than they were decades ago. And, so it is that onboarding, time capture and approval, purchase orders, payroll, production workflow and other processes are cumbersome tasks requiring too much paper and too much human time. Too much is too much. It doesn’t have to be that way. The fact is, the entertainment industry today can address its business-process challenges by embracing cloud technology and, specifically, the digitization of our business processes. This is not some stopgap or remedial fix. It’s actually a seminal moment: we are in the early stages of one of the most exciting business convergences of our lifetime. One, in fact, that is ushering in a new era of disruption and sophistication and creating unprecedented opportunity for this industry. Winners will be the ones driving production efficiency because investing in off-screen business processes improves on-screen results. That’s worth repeating. ​Winners will be the ones driving production efficiency because investing in off-screen business processes improves on-screen results. So, how do we get there? How do we ensure the industry’s most efficient, collaborative and creative production lifecycle we could imagine? Answer: by linking all the task-specific solutions through a truly unified platform. Cast & Crew is in a unique position to correlate and stitch together the end-to-end production process because we touch every aspect of the lifecycle … from script to crew onboarding to post. Imagine: ● ● ● ● ● Seamlessly ingesting a script (and all its metadata) written on Final Draft into our production workflow management solution ​Studio+​. When you’re ready to onboard a crew, do it in minutes with digital start paperwork through ​Start+​. Crew members can input time electronically with ​Hours+​, time cards can be approved at the touch of a button and production accountants have immediate visibility into hours-to-gross. Track, review and report all costs and purchases with industry-leading production accounting software ​PSL+​ and our digital purchase order solution ​PO+​. And all of the data between these software solutions is seamlessly shared via Studio+. Think about it: You don’t need to cope with disjointed products. You don’t need to accept inefficiencies. You don’t need to waste time trying to connect dots and data between, and among, systems that should be working together. Cast & Crew’s unified production-workflow solution, ​Studio+​, not only brings together the various disparate processes into one platform, it provides features – collaboration, distribution, file sharing and search – that address production’s most enduring pain points. And, as a result, you will look at production differently because we have reinvented the way you do production. John Berkley, President of Cast & Crew, recently sat down with us to share his own thoughts on how Cast & Crew is playing a critical role in this transformation and the importance of the unified platform. Watch now: — Interested to learn more about our unified platform, or request a demo of Studio+? Send us an email.​