How to Automate Vani Software

A shot list is the film before anyone has seen it

Vani Software is production tracking built for VFX and animation studios, and the thing it tracks is a shot. A show arrives as a list of them, each carrying a sequence, a department, an artist, a version count and the date it is meant to be delivered on. Beside the shots sits the asset library: the rigs, models and environments that several shots depend on at once.

The people in it all day are production. The coordinator lives in the shot list. The producer wants the same list summarised. Supervisors want it filtered down to their own department. Artists want to know which three shots are theirs today. The studio also runs the work that has gone out to vendors and freelancers through it, which on most shows is a growing share of the whole.

The same software serves game and CGI studios, where the vocabulary changes and the shape does not: a great many pieces, several departments, one delivery date that is not going to move.

The morning goes on asking people where a shot is

Nobody joined a studio to build a status sheet, and somebody builds one every Friday.

It starts with opening the client's review tool to see which shots picked up notes overnight, then matching those notes back to a shot and a version in the tracker so a lead can read them next to the work. It carries on with a message to the vendor studio asking for their end of the list, which comes back as a spreadsheet in their format rather than yours. Then the shots that have been sitting in client review too long, which nobody notices until somebody counts. Then percent complete by sequence, typed into a channel before stand-up.

Each of those is a person reading one screen and typing into another. On a long show it is somebody's whole morning, every morning, for a year and a half.

Vani Software

Shots stuck in client review Everything sitting with the client past the window you agreed, with the version, the age and the person it is waiting on, ready each morning.

Retakes caught while they still matter Shots whose version count has climbed past what was bid, flagged early enough to talk about rather than counted up after the show wraps.

The status sheet, already written Percent complete by sequence, gathered off the shot list and posted where production already looks, before the first stand-up of the day.

Version history explains a retake after it has happened

Vani does the inside of a pipeline properly, and it is worth knowing how much before adding anything on top. Shot progress is visible in real time across departments, with filters so a lighting supervisor sees lighting and not everything. Version history and retake logs sit on the shot itself, which makes the number of times something went round a fact rather than an argument. Assets carry ownership, tagging, change logs and versioning, and dependency mapping shows which shots a changed rig has just put at risk. Crew planning shows who is occupied, on leave or free, and effort bid against effort actually spent is reported rather than remembered.

All of that is true of what has been entered into it.

The client's review tool is not in it. Nor is the vendor studio's own tracker, the transfer service the plates arrived on, the render queue, or the accounting system that knows whether a delivered milestone was ever paid for. Those are the places a show is actually judged, and every one of them is a login, a screen and a person copying between the two.

Overnight notes can reach the shot before the lead does

Let the tracker do its own asking, and the Friday status sheet stops being a Friday job.

The shots sitting in client review longer than the window you agreed can be waiting each morning, with how long, which version and who has them. Notes left in the review tool overnight can be read off and matched back to the shot and version they belong to, so a lead opens the tracker instead of a browser tab. Percent complete by sequence can be posted to the production channel before anybody stands up.

It works on the money side of a show too. Shots whose version count has climbed past what was bid can be flagged as the count climbs, rather than at the wrap when the money has already gone. A milestone whose shots are all approved can be turned into a draft invoice. The milestones that were delivered months ago and never paid for can be listed on a Monday instead of discovered at the end of a quarter.

None of that needs a pipeline engineer, an API on the client's side, or a facility agreeing to connect their systems to yours. Their review tool has a login and a screen, which is all the job actually requires.

The creative call stays with the supervisor

Deciding a shot is finished is a supervisor watching it, and no amount of collecting changes that.

WebRun takes the reading and the copying. It signs into Vani, the client's review tool and the vendor's tracker in a real browser, under your own logins, on a schedule that suits the show. It reads what moved, writes it back against the right shot, and prepares whatever comes next. Anything that leaves the studio, a note to a client, an invoice, a chase to a vendor, is drafted and waits for the producer.

The cards below are the jobs around a shot list that already run this way.