Thanks to a meeting with the owners and senior staff at Big Jump Productions this week, there is greater assurance that everything is moving in the right direction. Trying to design the Drupal platform (a powerful open source content management system) around an animation production pipeline has its challenges. Namely, how to pole and present the data contained within to different users.  So far, I have been focusing on the basic episodic production hierarchy of production/episode/scene.  You could also use other names like project/show/shot.  They are same but for the sake of designing a system to manage it, we’ll settle on the former example. Now I need to address the hierarchy of departments with the production.

Also decided in the meeting, was the move away from managing file uploading/downloading with the CMS .  This was mostly because of the load it might put on the system.  Productions are all full HD so some scene files coming out of Flash could top 70 MB or more.  Storyboards, which are drawn all digitally, have to be sectioned up because a given sequence of scenes could produce a Flash file well over 150 MB. It’s disappointing that Drupal can’t do it all, and who knows, maybe it can, but, for now it’ll have to be a two-tiered system.  The first tier is Drupal and very efficient, and the second tier will still have user uploading/downloading files to server folders both in-house and over FTP when connecting from out-of-house. Perhaps after things have been up and running for a while, I’ll test a small department with their file uploading/downloading needs and see how the system handles it.

So next week we set up the web server and move over the Wordpress Blog.  If that goes well, there will be time to move the Drupal CMS over as well. The CMS is a password protected site, o I am not worried about continuing development in a live setting. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve got a couple more weeks before I want to introduce users to the CMS.  There will be a lot of streamlining and the training to do before that happens. It should be an interesting week, next week.