Sons of Motion Pictures explains how they kept track of all their projects at their agency, while producing film advertising content for clients including Microsoft, Lufthansa, and Siemens.
We chatted with Editor and Colorist Susanne Masuch about her experience with Yamdu in post-production, and how it helped manage a high project volume in a busy advertising agency.
Key takeaway
"What you need for a production to be good is transparency and communication and you get this with Yamdu."
Susanne Masuch Editor and Colorist at Sons Of Motion Pictures
Who is Sons of Motion Pictures? And what type of work are you involved in?
Sons of Motion Pictures is a full service advertising film agency based in Leipzig. Our team consists of 45 people that cover all stages of production - from the first idea during the concept phase all the way over to postproduction delivery. We offer a wide range of film and video products. This includes national advertising campaigns for social media, broadcast or cinema, but also more general B2B and B2C films for products, recruitment and image. We also produce your more traditional film works such as full length documentaries, short films, and even a pilot for a web series.
Can you tell us more about your position and the responsibilities you have at Sons of Motion Pictures?
Absolutely, my name is Susanne Masuch and I am an Editor and Colorist at Sons of Motion Pictures. I recently added a new position to my title as a Post-production supervisor, and as you can imagine, most of my work is focused in that area of post-production.
Production still of "Fool Service" TV series.
What were some of the problems you encountered before you found us?
As our projects got bigger and more complex it just became harder to keep track of everything that was going on in one project. We’ve used every type of platform out there: from Excel to concept boards, Vimeo, and even Discord! But we had quite a few problems with using so many different platforms for the different aspects of production.
For instance, Discord was strictly used for communication between our colleagues. But it caused a lot of problems, especially if a colleague was absent. We would need to go through the conversation log to find what we needed and in general, information was getting lost or hidden.
So why Yamdu? And how did you discover Yamdu?
Actually it was a colleague of mine who found Yamdu and pitched the software to the rest of the company. Then we all tested the software for ourselves, and really liked what it had to offer.
Because we do everything in-house from conception to storyboard to delivery, we needed something that could handle the full extent of our work. And Yamdu delivers this. It’s become easier to track everything with the built-in file system. We can input important information concerning the project and make lists of all the things that will be needed for that particular project. Now it's used for pretty much every project at the company! Every project that we work on is unique, so we’re always coming up with new ways of using the platform in a way that suits the purpose of the intended project.
On the set of a commercial.
What were some of the main benefits of Yamdu that you found useful for production?
What you need for a production to be good, is to have transparency and communication, and you get this with Yamdu. It minimizes the need for unnecessary communication. We don’t need to bother the director with useless questions, instead, we can find all that information by ourselves because we all know where to find everything. Anyone who is invited to a project will have access to see all the different aspects of production. They can make comments on specific things in production and everyone will be able to see it and share the information with whoever else needs to see it.
How did you find our features? As an editor, which ones stood out to you the most?
Interconnectivity of everything in Yamdu is a game changer for us. For example: our graphics artists import the final individual storyboard shots into Yamdu, which pre-production then uses to plan shots for our call sheets. Then, post production uses the same individual shots to collect detailed information that's needed by our VFX artists. The editor can use the shot to write down start and end time codes for everyone, identify which camera file to use, and where to find that camera file on our company server.
The VFX artists would then use those same shots to communicate when it's done and where to find that finished render. The image and shot itself is only uploaded once by a single person. And that can be reused over and over again without having to re-upload it each time.
The resource planner also came in quite handy: we always knew who was assigned to finish the edits, when new sound or animation renders could be expected, and how long each step of production would take.
An example of specific VFX shots planned in post-production
And were the rest of the crew/your colleagues receptive to Yamdu?
Yamdu is such an expansive platform and it’s quite detailed, but it only took us a couple of weeks to learn the platform inside and out. We actually have what we call “Yamdu experts” in the company, who would teach us how to use the software and its tools in full context. But we had no real troubles integrating it into our workflow or with the rest of the crew.
Would you continue to use Yamdu again for future projects?
Definitely! As you work with Yamdu and feed it more content, it saves all that information, like resources, on the database which makes it so much easier to work on for future projects. All that information is already logged on there, so we don’t need to input everything again from the beginning with each and every new project. We just have to continue to add to it. Yamdu just makes life easier in production, you don’t have to scroll through 10 thousand google docs or different web pages, you have everything in one place for everybody and nothing can get lost.
