Creative production
Resource planning for studios, agencies and production teams
Creative work runs several projects through the same small group of people and rooms. A shoot that runs long, a client who asks for another round or a pitch with a fixed date reshuffles weeks of work, and planners need to try a new arrangement without losing the one that worked.
Many projects, few specialists
A post-production house has two grading suites, one sound stage and a handful of editors. An agency has strategists, designers and copywriters shared by every account. Each project passes through phases such as pre-production, shoot, edit, review and delivery, and each phase needs particular people or facilities.
The plan is renegotiated constantly. Clients approve late, a shoot needs an extra day, a key person is on leave. Because phases hand off to each other, one slip travels downstream until it meets a fixed date: an air date, a launch, a festival submission.
People are not booked like rooms. A designer can split a week between two campaigns; an edit suite cannot hold two sessions at once. A useful plan treats those two kinds of resource differently.
Calls a producer or resource manager makes
- 01
Who is on which project this week
Allocating specialists across concurrent projects, often in half or full days, and noticing when someone is booked beyond their week.
- 02
Booking the scarce rooms and kit
Stages, edit and grading suites and camera packages are exclusive. Their bookings anchor the rest of the plan.
- 03
Absorbing a slip
When the shoot moves, the producer decides whether the edit moves with it, starts on partial material or gets a second editor.
- 04
Protecting the fixed date
Delivery, air and launch dates do not move. Everything else is planned backwards from them.
- 05
Trying a plan before committing
Planners rearrange a phase to see whether it fits, and need to step back cleanly when it does not.
Modeling projects, people and facilities
Put people and facilities in rows, tasks and bookings in events, and treat hand-offs as links your application interprets.
- Resources
- Group people by discipline and facilities by type in a resource tree. Row header columns can show role and weekly capacity, which your application uses to compute allocation.
- Events
- Each task or booking is an event with project, client and phase as custom fields, rendered through React slots so the project is legible at a glance. FinishToStart links connect hand-offs such as shoot to edit, and separators mark delivery or launch dates across every row.
- Time scale
- Facilities read best in hours over a few days, people in days over several weeks. Zoom levels switch between the two without touching the data.
- Rules
- Allow overlap on people rows and refuse it on facility rows by setting args.allowOverlap per drag in onEventMoving. Enable multi-selection and allowMultiMove so a whole phase moves at once, and record changes with createHistory, grouping cascades in history.batch so one undo restores them.
Planning surface and production system
- Links between tasks, drawn from your data and kept attached while events move
- Multi-selection, rectangle selection and moving several tasks together
- Undo and redo with labeled entries and grouped changes
- Resource trees and row header columns
- Event content rendered with your own React components
- Separators for fixed dates
- Critical path, dependency enforcement and any automatic rescheduling
- Capacity and allocation math, such as hours per person per week
- Budgets, time tracking and client approvals
- Persisting changes, and making undo reach the server as well as the screen
- Notifying people when their bookings change
Working examples
Habits that make a plan unreliable
One overlap rule for people and rooms
Refusing all overlap blocks real part-time allocation; allowing all overlap double-books a grading suite. Decide per row.
Undo that only changes the screen
With controlled events, give createHistory an apply function that updates your state and backend, so an undone change is undone everywhere.
Linking everything
A link on every task turns the plan into a web. Link the hand-offs that actually constrain dates, and let the order within a phase speak for itself.
Allocation shown only as color
Color alone cannot tell 50% from 80% and fails readers with color-vision deficiencies. Put the figure in the event content or a row column.
Questions
Can I undo a drag-and-drop change in the schedule?
Yes. createHistory from super-scheduler/history records moves and resizes by default, responds to Ctrl or Cmd+Z and Ctrl or Cmd+Shift+Z, and exposes undo, redo and entry labels for your own buttons. Use history.batch to group several changes into one entry.
Can one person be booked on two projects at the same time?
Yes. Overlap is allowed by default and overlapping events stack within the row. If facilities must stay exclusive, set args.allowOverlap to false for those rows in onEventMoving and onEventResizing.
Does SuperScheduler calculate the critical path or move dependent tasks?
No. Links are a typed visual relationship, such as FinishToStart; they do not move other events. Your application decides what a slip means for downstream work and updates those events, ideally as one undoable change.
Can I move all the tasks of a phase together?
Yes. Select them with Ctrl or Cmd click, or with rectangle selection, enable allowMultiMove and drag one of them to move the group. The change arrives through the usual handlers.
Two creative demos
Framehouse handles a shoot that runs long and reorganizes post-production; Studio North redistributes campaign tasks and recovers a change with undo. Both businesses are fictional.
Working examples