.jpg)
The Florida State University College of Motion Picture Arts is the film school of Florida State University, located in Tallahassee, Florida. Over 200 undergraduate and graduate students are enrolled in classes, many who are pursuing Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees. The Film School places students in an immersive environment where they develop filmmaking skills through hands-on practicals. This takes the form of film projects that students are expected to execute throughout their program.
The FSU Film School produces close to 30 independent films each year. As students move through each program, they enter different cohorts. Each cohort has project-related work to do every semester, so there is a constant cycling of cohorts as students move through the program. Both undergraduate and graduate students take on multiple roles to make these productions possible. It’s critical to understand which students have the capacity to commit to certain roles, based on their skill set and availability. Historically, FSU has used spreadsheets to assign students to different roles in different productions, mostly to avoid scheduling conflicts.
Because of the cumbersome nature of spreadsheets and the manual work that goes with them, the team was struggling to understand which students truly had the capacity to commit to different roles. Mapping out and orchestrating multiple film projects, across several classes involved coordinating data for nearly 150 undergraduate and graduate students. This data changed constantly and often timelines spanned across semesters, making it almost impossible to accurately and efficiently track information. For example, scripting and filming may happen during one semester, but editing may happen down the road in a future semester, so it was important for the team to have a central hub of data that was current and reliable.
Scheduling, assigning roles, and having visibility into conflicts, all in spreadsheets, involved a lot of manual work that was time consuming. FSU was looking for a user-friendly solution that was not only more efficient, but also scalable to support a growing program.
OrangeDot used monday.com’s infrastructure to build a custom coded, interactive application which allows the FSU team to utilize a customized gantt chart view. By taking a complex series of spreadsheets, OrangeDot simplified their view, making it easy to see all roles in a given production and assign students to roles. The team can also easily click, drag, and drop to change the timeline of a role or production.
Now, when students are assigned to roles, the team can quickly see who is and is not available for that time frame, and they get an error message if they try to assign a student to a role that has a scheduling conflict. They can also customize their views to be organized by semester and filter the data using custom fields such as production cycle.
This solution is significantly faster than FSU’s old spreadsheet process, saving time and manual effort. The team is able to see live conflicts and the new solution will not allow the team to assign students who are already at capacity with other commitments during the same time block, making this data much more reliable and current than their old spreadsheets. This gave the FSU team new capabilities in monday.com that were missing in spreadsheets, streamlining processes and reducing duplicate effort.
.jpg)
