Over the past month, it feels like the world has changed yet again. This time, though, rather than hunkering down, the team at Planet Nutshell wanted to take action. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how we can make a difference, have a positive impact, and make improvements where necessary. And we settled on three key positions that we felt were important to share.

1. Planet Nutshell remains committed to producing high-quality media that serves a cause higher than ourselves. As a team, we have all made a choice to make media that matters, media that is meaningful, that supports nonprofits and social causes, and that helps our audiences learn and grow.
2. Planet Nutshell will continue to emphasize and prioritize diversity and inclusivity. It makes us stronger, better, and more aligned with the world we live in. We believe that we can do better in this regard, and we will be launching a new initiative in the coming months that allows us to nurture talent from disadvantaged communities.
3. Planet Nutshell is working to embody the change we want to see in the world. We can’t share too much now, but we are excited to unveil a major new project soon that amplifies voices that are underrepresented in America. Meanwhile, we are in the process of donating a production to a social nonprofit. 

I want you to know this is not a one-and-done post. We are holding ourselves accountable to these statements and will be checking in with you all — our audience, loved-ones, and clients — about our progress. I remain hopeful and optimistic that we are all moving towards a better place, one that is more just, more equitable, and healthier for all. Change is hard. But it must come and we’re excited to be a part of it.

As social distancing and remote work have become the norm in many places, how can teams still create media and tell stories collaboratively and safely? Animation is one obvious solution, as it can be produced entirely remotely. That is, it can be, so long as you have the right systems in place and the right tools available.

I wanted to share some of the tools and processes that have set up our team for success as we all work remotely, and allowed us to go from client brief to final cut, all from the comfort of our house slippers. In part one (which you’re reading now — hi!), I’ll go over project management, communication, and productivity/file sharing, and in part two (stay tuned!), we’ll have a look at our creative collaboration tools for storyboarding, design, and animation.

Project Management

A couple of years ago, I spent months searching for the right project management tools, ones that allowed us to work the way we wanted to work, but even more efficiently.

Finally, we settled on a combination of Asana and Instagantt. Asana is great because we can easily assign tasks to both our internal staff and freelancers, and everything appears on a calendar. When tasks are complete, assignees can check them off and get that wonderful feeling of satisfaction (who doesn’t love crossing items off their to-do list?). Plus, there’s even a unicorn that flies across the screen (seriously!) when a task is completed.

Meanwhile, Instagantt, which can be purchased as an extension for Asana, lets us chart out projects on a timeline, allocate our resources, and see how projects are overlapping. Sam, our producer, lives in Instagantt, keeping track of the status of every detail. Without Instagantt, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be nearly as efficient as we are, as it helps us schedule and allocate precious resources with a ton of precision across multiple concurrent projects.

Communication

Slack is our most important remote communication tool, by far. We create a “channel” for each project so that everything for that project lives in one place. We also have channels for artwork, animation, and ideas that inspire us; potential freelancers; upcoming events; and more.

We recently added a little app to Slack that allows us to take polls to get consensus on creative decisions. Here’s a recent one Mollie made to help us decide which music track to use for our upcoming reel:

When we need to talk one-on-one or as a team to go over an issue, discuss a design, or share our screens to go over a sequence we’re working on in After Effects, we hop on a video chat. We also meet more formally three times a week to hang out and do a show and tell. There are, of course, many solutions for this, but we prefer Google Meet, because it’s part of G Suite, which we use for email, as well as sharing docs, calendars, and spreadsheets in the cloud.

File Sharing

This is a biggie, as the lifeblood of our work is the creative files we’re creating and sharing, and many of those files are quite large in size. After Effects projects, Illustrator files, Photoshop files, audio and video files.. the list goes on and on.

For about a decade, we have relied on one solution that is essential to our operations and has almost never let us down: Dropbox for Business.

Why is it the best, in my view? It gets out of the way, and it just works. Create or update a file on your computer’s hard drive just like you would any other file, and it’s instantly available to your team members on their hard drive. It’s as simple as that. Need to send a file to a client for review? Right clink on the file in the Finder or Directory, and you’ve got a link to share with them. Everything is backed up effortlessly, too. There’s a great feature, called Smart Sync, that lets you decide which files actually live on your desktop vs. being stored in the cloud. This lets you download files when you need them, so you don’t fill up your hard drive with files you’re not working on, or use infrequently.

Stay tuned for part two, when I’ll show these tools in action as part of our remote production process.