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June 25, 2020

Finding a Path Forward

  • Posted By : Joshua Gunn/
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  • Under : Uncategorized

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.


June 15, 2020

Meet Our 2020 Summer Interns

  • Posted By : Joshua Gunn/
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  • Under : Uncategorized

This summer, we’re happy to welcome two interns to the team. We’re excited to have them on our planet and we can’t wait to see what they create.

Audrey Ruano

Hi, my name is Audrey Ruano and I was born and raised in Boston, MA. Last year, I graduated from SCAD with a BFA in animation, specializing in 2D animation and motion media. During my senior year, I became more involved in motion design, and quickly fell in love with After Effects animation and vector illustration.

While I plan to keep improving my design skill set, I want to continue my education in electrical systems and explore new ways of incorporating art, design, and science. I have always been passionate about creating and recently, I have also found a new interest in construction and technology. I believe that art and design go hand-in-hand with these interests, and I’m excited to see how I can combine them in the future.


Sammi Brady-Myerov

My name is Sammi Brady-Myerov. I’m 17, and I am a student at Brookline High School. I started animation and art three years ago in my freshman year and I haven’t stopped since.

Besides animation, I also throw shot put, discus, and javelin for the BHS varsity track team; I am the assistant equipment manager for the BHS athletic department; I run the Mutual Aid Brookline hotline; and I am very involved in social justice work around my community.


June 4, 2020

Animation: A How-to Guide for Remote Production (Part 1)

  • Posted By : Joshua Gunn/
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  • Under : Uncategorized

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.

The Asana calendar from a recent project.

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.

A look at a recent project, mapped out in Instagantt, available as a standalone product, or as an extension for Asana.

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:

A Slack poll helps us make creative decisions as a team.

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.

A recent Google Meet video chat. What’s going on here? Who knows!

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.

No matter where you go, everything is always in the cloud and your workstation. Thanks, Dropbox!

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.

Dropbox’s Smart Sync feature is fantastic and simple to use, giving you access to the files you need without filling up your hard drive.

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


May 4, 2020

Thoughts on Remote Company “Culture”

  • Posted By : Joshua Gunn/
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Up here in New England, spring finally seems to be on its way. Warmer weather means you may run into neighbors on the front porch and find yourself chatting, as I did this weekend, with the family that lives below us in our apartment building. Making sure to stand six feet apart, we didn’t talk about anything particularly noteworthy; we caught up about our lives, our work. We commiserated about toilet paper. Then, it dawned on me that this was one of the first extended conversations I’d had in the physical world — not via video chat — for a very long time. And it felt so good!

For me, there’s something about in-person contact that can’t be re-created via video chat. And I feel a deep sense of loss about that. Video flattens the nuances of body language. It forces interactions, especially among teams, into something different from a conversation. It feels like a parade of presentations, of “now it’s your turn to be on camera” moments. Indeed, it’s becoming clear that video conferencing is more stressful and exhausting than in-person conversations. And I feel that way, too.

Instead of recognizing this, the response to our new reality from many organizations has been to exacerbate that stress by hosting all manner of video-based social meetups, happy hours, and other gatherings in an effort to maintain company “culture” and morale through a trying time. The goal seems to be to re-create the way things were in an effort to protect employees from the way things now are.

But that’s impossible. The world is different now. My feeling is that organizations and the people of which they are comprised should be given the space to grieve that lost world. I think we are just now in the first stages of that. It has been said that denial is the first stage of grief. Perhaps the desire to keep things as close to the way they used to be is part of that denial.

So, what are some practical solutions for maintaining a sense of team cohesion in times of change and stress? What does a more authentic culture look like, one that acknowledges that we are undergoing a trauma? Here are some thoughts:

  1. Recognize that this is hard. Don’t try to protect employees from the hardship by denying it or reframing it as something that can be solved via video chat or other forms of technology. This is hard. This requires grief. Own that.
  2. Be transparent. If you lead a team, show your vulnerability. Maybe you’re scared, or overwhelmed, or just plain weirded out by all of this. Show that, so that others can feel like they can show it too. (Maybe even write a blog post about it and post it on your website?)
  3. Lay off the meetings and let people be so they can figure out what works best for them. Let people know you’re there for them, but let people discover their pathway forward.
  4. Connect authentically. Find a way to connect your team in ways that let them show what their real lives under social isolation are like. One strategy is to do a show and tell. We’ve been doing that each week for nearly a month now. We each show something meaningful from our homes. For me, it’s often bike stuff. For Sam, it’s inflatable unicorns with a gorilla on top. It’s a little ritual that acknowledges the oddity of our times, while giving us a real way to connect, to get to know more about each other, even when we can’t be with each other.

Things are different now. Let’s challenge ourselves to feel the loss of what came before, but to also find authentic joy in new places.


April 15, 2020

Stuck at Home? Time to Get Coloring!

  • Posted By : Joshua Gunn/
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  • Under : Uncategorized

We know it’s tough to be cooped up, so we thought we’d make it a little easier by creating a “Color Board.” What’s a Color Board? We adapted a storyboard from one of our favorite series, Yana & Egbert, and created a coloring book. Download it by clicking the big purple button below, and enjoy!

Yes, I want to color!

When you’re done coloring, watch the episode to see how your color choices compare to ours.

And hey, feel free to send us your creations and we’ll post them to our Instagram.


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