Cinapse Case Study: NBCUniversal’s Resident Alien Season 4

Introduction 

NBCU’s Resident Alien faced a demanding production schedule that required extensive collaboration and flexibility. The Assistant Directors (AD) department, led by 1st AD Gurgit Chohan, hoped to leave the limitations of traditional scheduling software behind and embrace the future. For this, they turned to Cinapse, the modern alternative to legacy scheduling software.

The Challenge 

Prior to implementing Cinapse, AD department members faced common scheduling challenges posed by legacy software:

• Cross-boarding difficulties: Managing the scheduling of episodes concurrently with another AD team was inefficient and time-consuming

• Limited collaboration features: Without the ability to share access to the master schedule, the 1st AD had to maintain ownership and take time away from strategic priorities to provide necessary schedule information to other team members, production teams, and key stakeholders

• Static schedule updates: All master schedules were owned by a singular user, which meant teams had to regularly come together to resolve redundancies and errors to update the master schedule

The Solution: Cinapse 

Cinapse provided a modern, collaborative, cloud-based scheduling platform that addressed these challenges: 

• Real-time cloud collaboration, ensuring seamless updates between AD teams

• Optimized cross-boarding capabilities, allowing for better coordination and more efficient scheduling for concurrent episodes

• Live schedule updates, reducing manual data entry and errors while providing more collaboration between team members as well as increased experience in hands-on scheduling for junior team members

• Improved accessibility, enabling team members to work from the most up-to-date schedule without worrying over version control

The Results 

By the time they called it a wrap on Resident Alien, the AD department had experienced significant improvements in workflow efficiency, collaboration, and clarity resulting from switching to Cinapse:

• Workflow efficiency

• More intuitive schedule views bringing all of the relevant variables necessary for scheduling into a single, user-friendly interface

• Manual data entry is stored in a stored in a singular source and automatically fed across views, reducing overall time spent performing primary data entry and secondary updates 

• Significantly Improved Collaboration

• ADs and team members could access and edit the most up-to-date schedule; easily checking, validating, and sharing data with other departments

• AD department teams could collaborate easily to schedule concurrent episodes, ensuring all elements from cast to special equipment were free of conflicts

Conclusion

By integrating Cinapse into the scheduling process, Resident Alien successfully streamlined its workflow, enhancing productivity and reducing inefficiencies. Gurjit Chohan and the team now operate with greater flexibility and coordination, demonstrating the necessity of modern scheduling solutions in today’s film and television industry.

Gurjit shared that:

“Cinapse has completely changed the way we approach scheduling. The ability to make live updates and collaborate instantly has saved us hours every week."

Join the Movement

Are you ready to revolutionize your production workflow? Try Cinapse today and experience the future of film scheduling firsthand.