Camera, Set, Action: Process Innovation for Film and TV Production

Film and TV productions, a key area in production screen business, comprise of processes with high demand for creativity and flexibility. However, despite the era of fast developing technology, film production processes are carried out in an old fashioned way. This is reflected, for example, by the fact that document processing accompanied by daily shooting activities is still primarily paper-based and coordinating geographically distributed cast and crew is purely manual or at best through emails. There is an opportunity to bring process innovation into this industry, which can streamline and optimise film production processes and thus reduce production costs.

Business Process Management (BPM) is the mainstream contemporary technology-enabled business improvement method. It has proven to provide significant benefits to an organisation in terms of cost savings and responsiveness to changes. In this paper, we apply BPM technology to process innovation for film production. We also share experiences in how to deal with innovation barriers in the film industry. Over the course of the investigation, a prototype called YAWL4Film was developed on top of a state-of-the-art BPM system. YAWL4Film supports collection and entering of production related data and automatic generation of reports required during film production. The system was deployed in two student productions at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), as well as in a feature film production by Porchlight, an independent film production company.