blog 2023 4 min read
How to Manage Stakeholders in Media Productions
When working on productions, there are a lot of moving parts: there’s the creative element, the technical component and a crucial collaboration component. Communicating with external stakeholders, managing the roles they play, and their input is vitally important to making your production or show a success. These stakeholders can be external partners in your team, clients, and other freelancers. In today’s world, you can be working with anyone, anywhere, with any time difference - meaning collaboration needs to be seamless. Luckily, disguise has a new tool to help.
Unique challenges when working in productions
Version management
In media production, content undergoes constant iteration, meaning collaborators need to pay attention to version management so they work on the most up-to-date version. While most collaborative tools are accustomed to handling files like images, videos and standard documents, media production involves an extensive amount of media types and formats, from 3D files and data blobs to PDFs and CAD documents. These all need to be reviewed and managed.
Reviews and feedback
With a need for timely feedback, review workflows in media and production are super important. An effective workflow takes into consideration the chain of command and approvals process, shares work in progress externally, tracks feedback, and delivers production-ready files.
Creating an efficient workflow
disguise empowers stakeholders their suite of cloud-based industry-leading tools designed to take projects from concept to delivery in one seamless, global content workflow.
One of these apps is disguise Drive, which sits at the heart of your production, acting as a central space to manage multiple assets, teams and projects. With disguise Drive, you can preview and interact with 3D content, receive feedback from teams anywhere in the world, manage versions, and share production-ready files with clients for approval. It has the unique ability to store, preview and review multiple filetypes, including 3D files.
Adding external stakeholders
Now, disguise Drive has an added capability: the ability to add guest accounts allowing teams to share and collaborate on projects with external stakeholders or freelancers. In just a few clicks, users can invite external partners, clients or collaborators to their organisation's cloud environment. Once invited, guests will need to register an account, ensuring a secure and user-friendly onboarding process. Guests have the option to become a Collaborator or a Reviewer, each with their own set of unique permissions: Collaborators share and upload assets while Reviewers view and comment on files.
Learn more about Cloud’s Guest Accounts capabilities
By providing controlled access to specific drives or folders, tailored to the unique needs of an organisation, sensitive data remains protected while collaboration is facilitated across the platform. This is reminiscent of the dailies workflow - a common production practice in film and tv production where stakeholders are sent a daily folder to review.
Entire folders can be shared as easily as a single asset, and teams can track changes to files and share the most up-to-date version with ease. This avoids unnecessary confusion and leaves more time to work on the right version with anyone, anywhere in the world.
Streamlining the sharing of project resources saves time and enhances productivity. With greater control of all content and collaboration in one centralised place and the ability to set limits on users’ functionality, data security and integrity are guaranteed. No additional paid seats are required. Guest accounts are temporary and can be removed when collaboration is no longer needed.
Guest Accounts promote active participation, shared ideas and insights, and ownership and responsibility among Collaborators. Feedback and evaluation is speedy with Reviewers are now able to easily add feedback, keeping the project on track.
Sharing work with everyone can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process, using disguise Drive, it's now easy to achieve seamless collaboration and feedback and control all content and stakeholder communication in one centralised place with the latest tool in the disguise Cloud suite.
disguise Cloud is completely free to get started. Its no-cost Starter plan includes 10GB storage, one Drive to work in and up to three Guest Accounts. Need more guests? The Pro paid plan offers up to 10 guests and the Studio paid plan up to 25.
