Agtel is an award-winning TV and video production company based in Dublin, Ireland. Below, Agtel's Alan Dargan explains why his team "loves using Basecamp and Highrise."
Agtel is recognised for the creativity and quality of its factual and documentary work for RTÉ and BBC, and we’re a market-leader in high quality videos that deliver results on-line for clients in the public and private sectors. As well as producing videos for clients like PricewaterhouseCoopers and the European Parliament, we also produce Ireland's longest running factual television series for state broadcaster RTÉ.
Basecamp is a great way for us to keep a track on projects from scripting straight through to post-production and delivery. It ensures that our clients have full visibility on every aspect of the process from asset management to deadlines.
Our clients love having a centralised hub for all project correspondence and can see where projects are at every moment. The main difference between corporate and TV work is that a corporate production (without a strict transmission date) can have ever-increasing amounts of amendments and changes. We recently had a job that spanned over two years and Basecamp was crucial in staying on top of all the changes over it's lifetime.
Highrise helps us keep a track of new business - we use Wufoo forms which integrate tightly with Highrise ensuring that all new business queries become a part of our project workflow from the off.
Our workflow usually starts with a query arriving from a Wufoo form on the Contact Us page on our website which immediately becomes a case or pending deal in Highrise. From here we can track initial correspondence with a potential client.
When a job is won we add a job to Basecamp, issue the client with a username and password and try to mediate all further correspondence through Basecamp. The starting point for any production is usually a script and a schedule and Basecamp allows us to keep track of important dates with Milestones and upload and track iterations of scripts. Confusion arising from versions mailed back and forth can cause headaches so knowing that everyone is working on the right one gives peace of mind. Tracking versions is also enormously helpful when it comes to posting up cuts of a production. We usually timecode these so clients can reference specific parts of an edit and we can then add the amendment to a To-Do list and action.
To-dos are hugely important and become even more so as a project comes to the end. It’s incredibly important that all changes received from a client are carried before a DVD duplication run is started or a production goes to air and it ensures that everyone can see what needs to be carried out to bring the production to completion. If there’s any ambiguity about a list item a query can be commented and sent as a message to the client.
The TimeTrack OSX Widget logs the time spent on particular parts of a project and send them straight to Basecamp which helps a lot with our timesheets.
Having access to archived projects is also hugely helpful allowing us to instantly retrieve old projects’ assets and messages.
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