Post Producers/Post Supervisors & the Post Schedule
Post Supervisors are Producers who specialize in the post production process. Part chief of staff, part office manager, part coach; this dynamic role influences a show in numerous ways. But their most important responsibility is creating and maintaining the Post Schedule.
The Post Schedule is the primary tool used to keep a show’s stakeholders appraised of its progress through the post production process. A good post schedule includes the following information:
- Edit Start: when each episode is expected to start, and who is working on each episode.
- Episode Due Dates at each stage: (Rough Cut, Fine Cut, etc…).
- Notes Due: this is when stakeholders giving notes are supposed to deliver them to the production before overages occur.
- Total Days Late: if your production company wants to recover “breakage” from the network, this is often a good place to start. Wasted editorial days waiting for notes can add up to tens of thousands of dollars.
- Final Delivery Date: always begin with the end in mind!
Post Schedules come in a variety of formats. This is my “Dashboard” version:
Creative Executives often like the post schedule to be presented as a traditional calendar:
Bond companies, Studios, and Networks have their own formats too:
The crux of the Post Producer/Supervisor’s problem is that a change to one schedule, necessitates manually changing every other version. This is time consuming and error prone work. Here are some results from a recent survey about scheduling answered by 76 Post Producers/Supervisors:
The final problem with current Post Scheduling techniques is that a manually maintained Post Schedule limits the ability to collect and analyze data.
This Sankey diagram from the Netflix Technology blog is a little vague on details describing these production “blocks”. What do they represent? And how can the information be trusted if it’s gathered from such an error prone process?
PostSchedule.io is a web application that aims to modernize the post scheduling process; and these Medium posts are a journal of my process through user research, landing page creation, and bootstrapping its way into existence. I hope you enjoy the journey. And if this sounds like something you’d like to get involved in, feel free to contact me on twitter: lowbudgetfun.
