Happy Monday, everyone!

We’re slowly ramping up, and realizing the scope of the work to be done for Tights and Fights: Ashes. I think we’re doing some interesting things in trying to keep ourselves organized until we have a central production office. We’re all working from home but at the same time stay co-ordinated and on task.

Sure, we’re doing a funny, little web series about comic book heroes, but we still need to do all the same things the big boys do, more even so. (How much time do you think NBC Universal spends worrying about SEO and discoverability? Probably not so much.) And there’s just the three of us so it’s easy for things to get lost  in the cracks. Here’s some of the tools we use to communicate and co-ordinate.

Since we’re using both PC and Mac computers, we’re big users of Google Docs. Not only is it easy to see what other people have done, but there’s no problems in who’s using what type computer when; easily one of the biggest challenges in working with a group of people. (You know, “How do I open a docx file?” “This file is too big to email.” “What do you mean CS3 won’t open it?”)

The nice new-ish thing about Google Docs is that you can upload files, even if Google Docs can’t display it. We use Google Docs to distribute scripts written in Final Draft. That way, everyone has access to the latest draft. The sharing is already configured, you just upload to the right folder and everyone can access it. The big drawback is that you need to be your own tech support, because there will always be the guy new to Google Docs who needs extra help in figuring it out.

Once you get rolling, Google Docs is a great tool for production management. We wrote our application to the Web Series Pilot Fund using it. We use the spreadsheets to manage our time and resources, keep our contacts organized, make our script breakdowns and production board – almost everything. And it is free!

We also use Skype calls as meetings when we can’t meet face to face. (Although there’s no real substitute for face to face!) When we’re in a crunch, like the night before a big application is due and we’re all frantically writing and revising, we turn on Skype and leave it on – that way if there’s a question or a concern you can just blurt it out and hope someone will answer. It’s almost like creating a virtual office, and in some ways it is even more efficient than actual working in the same room!

Mandy.com is a service we use a lot. If you don’t know it, check it out. It is sort of like Craig’s List, but only for entertainment related type ads. It gets used primarily for casting (at least, in my experience) but you can put up an ad for just about anything.

I won’t go through every service we use (like seeing how we make videos, we spend a lot of time navigating Youtube) but there’s two that if they didn’t exist, we might not have been able to do all the stuff we do. One is WordPress. You’ll hear Christopher talk about it a lot. We build all of our web properties on WordPress. It makes it so easy to throw up new content that even I can do it! The other one, that you might not have heard of before, is TubeMogul. TubeMogul is a service to organize, launch and track your videos across just about every video uploading site on the web. You can stage your videos, tell it which to upload to when, and move on to another of the ten million things that need your attention. It’ll launch the videos on your schedule, and then if you want to track your stats you simply go the dashboard – all of your views and comments across the net are in one place. Very handy. We are planning on moving to a slightly different launch strategy for Tights and Fights: Ashes – one that won’t use TubeMogul for our ’first tier’ launch, but we still plan on relying on it heavily for our ‘second tier’ of video distribution.

One of the things that I obsess about is backing stuff up – I’ve seen it happen to too many writers and other creative workers. Your computer and your files are your life and your livelihood – if your hard drive goes crunch, how are you going to pick up and keep working? We used to use Microsoft Live Mesh, which has morphed into Microsoft Sync. Yes, I know, we’re all supposed to think that all things Microsoft are lame and evil, but they are doing some interesting stuff in moving away from the old, ‘one computer, one saved file’ way of working. We back up both across our computers using Microsoft Sync and on my networked hard drive in my apartment.

And, as if this post wasn’t boring enough (hey, I actually like talking about this kind of stuff!) I have one more piece of advice in working with a group – figure out how to share your computer’s files over a local network. It’s different with a PC and a Mac, but it’s not that hard. And it’ll make your life so much easier in the long run.

Those are the key free and sorta free online services we use to keep the GopherX.net team humming along. Don’t worry, not every post will be this geeky. Tomorrow I plan to talk about the part that, for me, is the most fun… the writing! How the heck did we get 180 video episodes written? Tune in tomorrow!