Tom Graves made an episode about one person Enterprise Architecture and we continue to use Enterprise Architecture mindset for a small film production company.

We have our business processes defined on a high level, and we are gradually documenting them in more detail, step by step when implementing new products to clients or new IT-systems.

Generic sub-processes for film production.png

The approach we take is to make the changes that gives most business benefit each time, but still support the long term direction and high-level plan.

This summer, we implemented a cloud solution called PostLab for collaboration between editors, e.g. a GitHub kind of solution to manage post-production workflow.

Screenshot from PostLab in actual production of a feature film

The reason behind this solution was a client project where two editors had to collaborate to make six corporate films in a short time period. The editors were located in different cities, so we couldn’t use a local IT-solution and we neither had a high-speed VPN connection.

We know that these type of projects will be more common, therefore, this is a case where we need a good solution. But good solutions can be dependent on timing and availability for new products.

Two months earlier, I joined an early access program for PostLab in Cloud, without knowing which next client project would be. PostLab had been running for several years as local installations, but the cloud implementation this spring was new. When joining the program, I had no knowledge of this upcoming film project, but EA is also about preparing for need before they arise from the business.

The next caveat was that PostLab only supported one NLE, i.e. FCP/X. Not a problem for us, as we took a decision more than a year ago that our main editing software will be FCP/X. But still, we had to set up a new edit suite for the other editor as he had used Premiere before.

The implementation went smooth, and we were able to collaborate in post-production in a controlled manner.

Next step in our cloud journey was to migrate to Office365, as the contract for the old mail solution expired in August. We needed a more scalable solution, as well as more functionality for larger film productions and other projects in the future.

Why choose Microsoft for this services? We had a lengthy internal discussion about the pros and cons with both Microsoft and Google as office platforms, and in the end Office365 won

With Office365, we have an AD in the cloud that makes it easier to manage all people involved in a large film production in the future. However, Azure AD doesn’t natively support MacOS and mobile devices, so there are still some issues to solve.

We also get additional possibilities to support our sales process with Customers (lightweight CRM) and Bookings (resource scheduling). Plans for this to be described in a later post.

Disruptive architecture