Shotgun: A Production Tool

A recent opportunity led me to Digital Domain Park in Port St. Lucie, FL this weekend. First of all, I must say that the stadium was more massive than I had thought it would be, but after sitting inside the stadium and looking out across the field, I was reminded that this was where the Mets go for Spring Training. It all made sense from there. I also enjoyed catching up with a lot of familiar faces who were already inside!

Getting back on track - this opportunity led me to research a particular piece of production software called Shotgun. Shotgun was developed by industry staff, for industry staff. If you take a look at some of the tutorial videos, as I have, you'll see the immense role it can play in making sure that everyone is involved in the production. It's not just a tool for production staff - even creative staff can leave comments on notes and get notifications when something they've been included on has been replied to. It really looks like a killer way to run a production, and the developers seem to be on point with maintenance releases and support. If you look at the list of studios that use Shotgun, it's like a roll call of all-star industry talent. Very impressive!

While I'm talking about tutorial videos, I also want to point out The Foundry's training site for Nuke. I absolutely am in love with the fact that technology has recently given us the ability to produce this multitude of high quality training and resource videos for applications like Nuke. They even link to a site called Nukepedia that has a four-part Shake To Nuke transition guide for people like me who haven't quite finished the leap yet - hey...maybe I like to shake my nodes to disconnect them from the tree, ok? ;) Full disclosure: I do often find myself trying to shake nodes in Nuke to disconnect them.