15
Automation
“I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.”
—Walt Disney
If there’s one thing every production needs more of, it’s automation. There is a great deal of repeatable work being done continuously throughout the lifetime of a production, whether it is administrative tasks or specific routines that a particular department follows. A great many of these are carried out manually, over and over again:
- ▸ Call sheets for the next shoot day are sent out at the end of a shoot day;
- ▸ Footage from the previous day’s shoot is gathered together for review;
- ▸ Cast members are notified about a last-minute script change;
- ▸ A location manager checks the weather forecast for changes;
- ▸ An editorial assistant requisitions a copy of an edited sequence;
- ▸ An accountant produces a daily budget report.
Any of these can potentially benefit from some automation. There are varying degrees with which this could take place; for example, you could have an email template that you use to send out a stock email every day, or you could have the email be sent out automatically at a certain time every day, or you could have the content of the email change based on different factors and be sent automatically when a particular event occurs. Each of these options is possible in one way or another, but the Cloud can make it easier to get them to work for you.
Box 15.1 The Paradox of Automation
There’s an inherent risk with depending on too much automation. The “paradox of automation” posits that, as some degree of human interaction is always required in an automated system, it becomes more critical the more that system is automated. Effectively, you remove the amount of work a person has to do, but in doing so you are building greater dependency on the part that isn’t automated.
Consider processing screenplay page changes. A less automated process might have someone compare two screenplays for changes, produce pages for each of those pages, and then send them out to people who need them. A more automated system might just have someone provide a before and after script and then work out the changes and send out the changed pages to people on a saved list. Though such a system is clearly more efficient, it does mean that the few parts that involve humans are more critical. If either of the scripts provided are wrong, for example, by the time someone notices, the changed pages would have already been sent out to potentially dozens of people.
Notifications
The simplest and most common form of automation you can expect from the Cloud is through notifications. An event occurs and some notification is produced as a result. The event can be anything, like uploading a file to Cloud storage, and there are many options for generating notifications, such as pop-up messages, emails (which in turn can trigger other notifications), or alerts on mobile devices. With the Cloud, multiple notification types can be produced for a single event, and they can span all of your connected devices. They can range from the subtle (notification on a smart-watch) to the attention-grabbing (automated phone calls), depending on how everything is set up.
Figure 15.1
Notifications Produced by the Cloud
Box 15.2 Push Notifications
One of the key technologies that have helped shape mobile computing is push notifications. Push technology, which allows services to “push” data to a remote device (as opposed to the remote device explicitly requesting the data), has been available in various forms for several years, but it’s on the Cloud where it really shines. Push notification in particular allows user-authorised services to send updates to mobile devices, computers, and browsers, which are then displayed to the user, giving them the choice to acknowledge, ignore or, in some cases, act on them.
Push notifications can be used for a variety of different situations which range from companies letting their users know about special offers or time-sensitive information to more specific, relevant information—for example, to let them know that a file has been received or an important task is due.
Integration
Hundreds of automatically-generated emails might be good for letting people know things have happened, but they aren’t necessarily going to help them actually do any of those things any faster. That’s where integrations between different services and systems come in. For example, because Gmail is integrated with Google Drive, you can add email attachments directly from Google Drive without having to save it locally first. It might not seem like much, but given that you can do interactions like this dozens of times a day, the time savings quickly adds up.
Although some of the services covered throughout this book try to offer an end-to-end ecosystem, a platform that you can use from start to finish (write your script in our product A, then break it down in our product B, and so on), history seems to indicate that the truly successful ones are those that are open to the idea that you might want to make use of third-party products to do at least part of what you need to do.
Some of them will accommodate this in an almost begrudging way, for example, by providing rudimentary import and export functionality. However, there are many that go a lot further, offering an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows some of its key functions to be controlled by another application or system. These APIs potentially offer incredible access and flexibility, although they can require you to have the technical resources and time to properly utilise them. Some services take this a step further, offering an API and some working integrations with other products that are already made. For example, Autodesk’s Shotgun (shotgunsoftware.com) comes with integrations with products such as Adobe Photoshop (adobe.com), and Slack (slack.com) features integrations with numerous Cloud-based services like Dropbox (dropbox.com).
Figure 15.2
Using an API to Send Data Between Services
Ad-hoc Integration
All of this is just the beginning, of course. Where the Cloud really starts to go from providing convenience to becoming indispensable is when you connect different services together. Consider a location scout uploading some photos to Dropbox. You could already be subscribed to the shared folder they’re in, so they’ll automatically download to a folder on your hard drive. But in addition, you could set it up so any photos added to that folder are automatically posted into a Slack channel for everyone to review, and you have a specific section in an Evernote notebook you want to keep track of things like that, so in they go for future reference. Oh, and these photos are actually really important, so you also need to receive a text message when they arrive.
All of this is possible via the APIs that each of the services provide, allowing data to be chained between them. But not everyone has either the time or expertise to actually make use of these APIs, and even where working integrations exist, they might not work in exactly the way you want them to. This is where services like Zapier (zapier.com) and IFTTT (ifttt.com) step in.
Figure 15.3
Technology Roadmap for the Internet of Things
These services allow users to create “ad-hoc” integrations between supported services in a very streamlined way. The technical aspects of the various third-party services’ APIs are abstracted to a very high degree so users don’t need to know anything about them, and are just presented with a simple interface to connect any two services together (with one service providing a “trigger” and the other an “action”), allowing for some customisation options specific to those services. For example, you could have Google Calendar provide the trigger and configure it to fire at the start of any event containing the word “casting” and then have the resulting action be to post a message to the “Casting” channel in Slack with notes from the calendar event.
Box 15.3 The Internet of Things
It’s not just computers and mobile devices that can connect to the Internet. A number of “things” are Internet-enabled in some way, leading to the growth of the so-called Internet of Things. Popularised perhaps by “smart” light bulbs that can change colour based on the time of day, the weather, or just about any metric you can think of downloading from the Internet, the concept can apply to what’s already a multitude of different things, from radiators to refrigerators.
It’s not just a gimmick, though. Various sources predict at least 20 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, both in the form of different types of sensors that are able to collect data and mechanisms to actually do things. The driver for this right now is home automation (hence the abundance of smart thermostats and smart kettles), but no doubt this will gradually expand into other areas. By 2020 we might begin to see smart cameras or even smart clapper boards.
Popular Automation Services
IFTTT (ifttt.com)
Pricing: free
Features: customisable trigger actions based on events from over 250 different services and devices
IFTTT (IF This, Then That) provides a well-rounded set of supported services (or “channels”), although aside from popular web services like Slack and Box, most of the channels are for hardware devices such as smart thermostats. IFTTT’s integrations (“recipes”) are triggered every 15 minutes.
Zapier (zapier.com)
Pricing: free (feature-limited), $20/month (“Basic”), $50/month (“Business”), $75/month (“Business Plus”), $125/month (“Infrastructure”)
Features: customisable trigger actions based on events from over 500 different services and devices, multi-step automation
Zapier’s main selling point is the huge number of integrations it offers, and many of these are for business-related services such as QuickBooks Online and GoToMeeting. However, the service is remarkably expensive compared to IFTTT, costing $1 per month per integration (“zap”), with caps on how many times zaps can be triggered each month. Zapier’s zaps are triggered every 15 minutes unless you shell out for a “Business” or better package, in which case they are triggered every 5 minutes.
We Wired Web (wewiredweb.com)
Pricing: $10/month (“Basic”), $20/month (“Plus”), $50/month (“Pro”)
Features: customisable trigger actions based on events from over 150 different services and devices
We Wired Web has fewer integrations but makes up for this by providing a little more control (and complexity) to users. Though functionally similar to Zapier and IFTTT, it uses a “wiring diagram” metaphor to allow the more technically-inclined to dive in and make changes to functionality.
Bibliography
Designing Smart Notifications https://medium.com/@intercom/designing-smart-notifications-36336b9c58fb#.6kto6kpyn
The Internet of Things Is Everywhere, But It Doesn’t Rule Yet http://www.wired.com/2015/12/this-year-was-almost-the-year-of-the-internet-of-things/