In a CG production CG artists are rockstars. Management and Technical Directors make sure they’d have everything they will need in order to create our next favorite movies. Moreover, most CG artists are freelance workers who hops from one studio to another. So, keeping track of who is currently in the studio and keeping up to date information about artists is an important activity for the production.
In this blog post we will discuss what are the information that you would need concerning the CG artists for better task assignation and proper follow-up.
Contact information
Obviously, the first thing you will need are contact informations (name, e-mail and phone number) to get ahold of the person easily.
The second thing will be their public social media links such as Linkedin or eventually Twitter. A portfolio link can be great too if you want to remember the artist style.
Finally, linking an avatar to all these informations will add a visual marker to your contact. It doesn’t necessarily need to be their actual picture, just something that will help you identify the person in a glimpse.
Current situation
It may sound weird but it’s better to note who is currently working in your studio and who aren’t. It will be useful for your pipeline tools to decide to restrict access or not. Better yet, it will allow you to filter unactive individuals and see who is working or who you can call.
Every time you change the status to inactive you can set a date as a reminder. That way you will know who you didn’t see for a long time.
Current situation in the studio
Do not forget that people in your studio needs your attention. The key is to know who is working on which project and the number of tasks currently handled by each CG arstist. That way you will know who is overworked or who is waiting for new shots or assets.
Skills
Knowing in which specific field people are good at is always useful, especially for assigning tasks. So asking your co-worker to mention what they prefer to do helps a lot. Modeling, animation, rigging are simple ways to describe that skills. Generalist is a good skill to mention as well when the person in question can help on all the part of the project. Don’t try to be too precise, evaluating skills is hard and constantly changes depending on the reference.
Salary
Average salary expected by the team member can be useful to build your budget estimation and current budgeting. The drawback is that this information is sensitive. So, you won’t be able to share this list easily unless you have a permission scheme or maintain two different versions of the table.
To conclude
The main challenge in storing data about CG artists is to keep important information up to date without acting like a spy and without overhelming you with unrelevant things. You need to know what is happening when they are inside and how to contact them when they are outside. In the following, we listed the infomation we mentioned in this article:
- Avatar
- Name
- Phone Number
- Links (Linkedin, portfolio, …)
- Skills
- Active or not
- Last presence in the studio
- Amount of tasks / time assigned
Once you have a clear overview, you can do your job more efficiently. Communication is easier, follow ups can be scheduled and trust is strengthened.
Footnote: Introducing Kitsu
Kitsu is the production management tool we develop. We aim to provide simple user interfaces for small and midsize studios to make production management easier. The first module we are working on is the people list. To illustrate this article, we use the mockups we made. Feel free to tell us what you think about it!
What do you think about CG artist relationship management? Help us in improving this article by commenting it. We’ll be glad to know how you deal with graphic designer relations!
