Cross-Country Production: Location, Location, Location?

Hi everybody!

I'm Kat, the associate producer of Burp's Christmas.  I met Mike, Veronica and a couple other talented key members of our team in college at UArts.  I was an animation major along with Mike.  Professionally I've held a variety of roles on all different types of productions, but this is my first time producing a film.

A few years ago I began managing projects at a multimedia firm and that experience has led to a lot of exploration creating different types of production pipelines.  I'm also a bit nerdy and love when a new technology development has a practical application in my day-to-day life.  So, over the course of the production, I'll share some of the tools we use behind, and not so behind the scenes to make things happen.  Some digital, some not.

Location is a logistical challenge for us.  Mike is in Philly, Veronica is in LA, and I'm in Jersey City (across the river from NYC) so here are three ways we stay in contact.

1. Conference calls
   The first method of real-time group conversation is via conference calls.  There are a handful of free conference call services out there that anyone can use to organize calls with any number of participants. 
   
2. Video chats
   While conference calls are great, video chats let us  see each other! 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   We're experimenting with both www.tokbox.com and Skype (no clear winner yet) because both of them allow us to have more than 2 participants in a video chat.  Both allow us to text chat as well, which is handy when sharing links during a discussion.  We haven't had the need for screen sharing yet, but Skype has that feature as well.  Best of all, it's free. All you need is a webcam.
   
3. Google Docs!
   Google Docs are awesome!  After years of organizing and tracking lots of assets and data, I've come to love spreadsheets.  I know it's hard for a lot of people to get excited about word processing and spreadsheets, but Google Docs makes it easy.  There's no need to send files back and forth anymore, we can share and edit the exact same file at the same time.  We are currently pulling together our investor packets, compiling a list of potential donors and keeping track of our schedule and meeting notes using gDocs.

While we can't do anything about the 3 hour time difference, we can stay on the same page and stay organized using these sweet, free, real-time solutions.