This month’s theme is Gear and Software. I’ll bet you think I’m gonna talk about the latest and greatest library, synth, hunk of rack gear, or atomic banjo tuner – but I’m not. Instead, we’ll explore a game-changer that addresses something you might be overlooking: glue. The kind you can use to keep your projects well-organized and the members of your film music team on the same page through the obstacle course of score concept development, cue prototyping, orchestration, and production, in the face of a barrage of revisions, even at the last minute.
Previous SCOREcast Online articles have mentioned a few tools and services that fit into this category. Deane Ogden, for instance, has shared some of his wisdom regarding Cue Log Manager, Cue Chronicle, and SpottingNotes.com. From their names, you’ve probably deduced that these three are explicitly oriented to some aspect of managing film music projects. The present article introduces a new, innovative collaboration tool that doesn’t come pre-configured for film music projects, but lets you easily build your own unique solution without having to be a software whiz.

Meet SmartSheet
SmartSheet is a highly-flexible web application, or web app, that lets you create a custom-designed collaboration environment. To learn about it first-hand, visit www.smartsheet.com. Although SmartSheet won’t instantly solve all your collaboration problems, I think you’ll discover it can be a huge gun in your arsenal. It’s amazingly easy to use and the cost is low.

SmartSheet is based on a spreadsheet-like paradigm, but has a feature set that orients it toward collaboration and project tracking rather than calculation of “what-ifs”. You create and customize your collaboration environment in terms of a set of … smart sheets. Each smart sheet is a collection of data and functionality with a purpose and structure that you define. On the surface, the look and feel of a smart sheet is similar to that of a conventional spreadsheet document – with rows and columns of cells, and user interface functionality that makes it easy for you to enter, view, and manipulate your data in whatever way your particular collaboration methodology might require.

As a composer using SmartSheet, you might think of designing a set of smart sheets that work like the documents you (and everyone else in the film music business) are already familiar with, such as spotting notes, timing breakdown, orchestral breakdown, recording session plan, track log, and so on. Up to a point, that particular approach could also be taken with a traditional spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft’s Excel. However, the unique palette of functions SmartSheet offers let incorporate a much wider and more imaginative spectrum of collaboration-supporting data and functionality into a smart sheet than you could into an ordinary spreadsheet. And other SmartSheet features let you manipulate whole sheets and even collections of related sheets (workspaces) in ways that make sense for collaborative, project tracking, and administrative purposes. Why not use these capabilities to organizing a re-usable infrastructure that supports collaboration between the many people who collaborate on a film music project, including the composer, music editor, film director, assistants, orchestrators, orchestra contractors, recording engineers, conductors, musicians, accountants, and so on? I say, go for it.

Putting Your Head In The Cloud, Not In The Sand
There’s (much) more. Beyond what it offers in terms of smart sheet structure and function, SmartSheet is designed from the ground up such that your sheets are inherently and transparently stored on a super-reliable, ultra-capacity remote server (not on your computer!) and shared over the web with team members and/or clients. In information technology jargon, we’d say that SmartSheet is built upon the cloud computing paradigm. There’s a massive computer somewhere, working all of SmartSheet’s magic, but the details are hidden behind a curtain – or, as it were, in the cloud. But you don’t have to worry about any of the web infrastructure details. Forget about having to become a computer or networking guru.

Not only are your smart sheets stored in the cloud, but so is the SmartSheet program itself. Nothing is stored in your computer, or the computers of any of your collaborators. So how you use it all? Well, to use SmartSheet, you open a web browser such as Firefox on your Mac, Windows, or Linux computer (or even a browser on a mobile device, such as an iPhone or BlackBerry) and log into your account on smartsheet.com – which, in effect, is the doorway into your custom cloud-based collaboratorium. Inside, you’re instantly presented with the sheets to which you have access rights, and you start working. It’s pretty intuitive.

Let’s think about the implications of being “in the cloud”. In the past, if you wanted to use personal computers to construct a distributed collaboratorium involving several individuals, you had to make sure they all had the same software on their computers. If the collaborators were independent contractors, each would have had to purchase and install his or her own copy of any software needed. You would have had to ensure that each collaborator owned a sufficiently compatible computer with adequate horsepower. And then there could be a steep learning curve. All of these factors would have been expense issues and coordination nightmares – which would have served as a barriers to ever getting the team together and off the ground. The idea of instant, effortless, low-cost, Internet-enabled collaboration would have been little more than a wistful dream.

But with cloud-based collaboration using SmartSheet, most of these barriers evaporate. All each collaborator needs is a low-cost laptop or netbook computer capable of running a modern web browser (and it doesn’t have to be the same browser on each individual’s computer). Mobile device fans can even connect via their smartphones when on the move. It’s literally true that if you’ve thought through your collaboration and project tracking methodology and have instrumented it in terms of a set of smart sheet templates, you can choose team members, invite them into your collaboratorium (by means I’ll explain below), and tie them together within a matter of hours or maybe even minutes, with very little learning curve and zero incremental buy-in cost on the part of invitees.

Notice that these benefits are in addition to the most basic advantage of any scheme for collaborating over the web: namely, that the members of your team can be distributed geographically – even across the globe – or, can be in the same room. This means new flexibility in how you think about team formation and professional relationships.

The Benefit Of Sourcing Documents From The Cloud
Let’s return for a moment to the fact that sharing project documents over the web is central to the way collaboration and project tracking are instrumented when using SmartSheet. But how does storing these documents in the cloud and sourcing them to team members from the cloud improve sharing?

Sharing documents might not seem like such a big deal at first, especially for computer-based documents. You think, of course I’m going to share my documents with my team members, just like I always have. And then you think: any time I revise a document, I’ll just send a copy of the updated document file to each team member, right?

There’s a potential problem with this thinking. If a separate copy of a document resides on each team member’s computer, and the document is subject to change (especially if it can be changed frequently or by more than one person), the possibility arises that different team members can find themselves inadvertently working with different versions of the document. In other words, team members can get out of sync with one another. What could make this happen? Score changes, of course! In today’s film music world, late changes – even up to the last minute – are an increasing risk. Why?

Well, in the pre-digital age, a much less automated post-production technology meant that late-stage changes to picture or dialog caused unacceptable disruption that could delay final release, with adverse financial impact. To avoid such disruptions, it used to be that picture lock was put into effect far earlier than it is now, relative to the targeted release date. The lengthy time allowed for post-production let the start of film music work be postponed until picture lock, and thus composers could usually rely on working against stable picture. But today, computers and digital technologies have drastically accelerated post-production, such that directors can (and often do) keep tweaking their films until much closer to the scheduled release date than before. In contrast, the process of composing and producing film music hasn’t accelerated to the same degree. The result is that music development is increasingly exposed to late dramatic and timing changes that require cues to be re-worked. Cue revisions mean that documents supporting the music development process are being changed. And, as I’ve pointed out, one of the ways a rush of changes can lead to chaos sand lost time is by causing inconsistencies to emerge between the versions of documents that different team members have.

But with SmartSheet and similar cloud-based document-sharing technologies, the idea is that team members don’t send copies of documents, revised or otherwise, to one another. Instead, a single copy of each document (a smart sheet) is stored in the cloud. All team members work with that single copy – which reflects the latest revision status – within the SmartSheet on-line environment. In this way, the emergence of conflicting document versions is avoided – and with it, the associated chaos.

Even better – although SmartSheet always shows you (or any team member) the latest version of a document, it also shows you at a glance what’s recently changed – information that could easily be overlooked with conventional documents. In addition, SmartSheet transparently maintains a history of all changes that have been made, as well as when and by whom they were made. You can access this history for any given smart sheet cell with a click of the mouse. Moreover, SmartSheet can be effortlessly configured to notify you or anyone else, by email, of any changes that may have been made by other team members.

And Now, The Bill …
I mentioned above that to use SmartSheet, you log into your account on smartsheet.com. But how did you, or any team member, get that account? And who pays?

Any given SmartSheet user is either a smart sheet creator or an invited collaborator. Among the group of people collaborating, there must always be at least one sheet creator, because if nobody has the ability to create sheets, there will be none. However, many or most film music enterprises are probably small enough that there need be only one sheet creator.

So, it all starts with an entrepreneurially-motivated individual – most likely the composer, who is typically at the head of his or her film music enterprise. That person opens one of several types of paid accounts with smartsheet.com. There is a monthly (or annual) fee (as little as $8.50 a month for the most basic account), which entitles the payer to be a sheet creator and provides an allotment of sheets. Acquiring a larger sheet allotment requires paying a higher monthly fee, as does having more than one sheet creator in the enterprise. See www.smartsheet.com/pricing for pricing details.

The sheet allotment you require is based on the maximum number of sheets your composing enterprise needs to have active at any given time. Imagine you’ve developed a standard work flow and the corresponding re-usable collaboration methodology that you intend to apply each time you take on a film music project. Next visualize that you’ve created 10 different smart sheet design templates that collectively capture all the aspects of your workflow and collaboration methodology. Finally, assume you plan for your enterprise to have the capacity to handle 3 film music projects simultaneously. In this example, you’ll need 10 sheets for each project, which means you’ll need a sheet allotment of 30 sheets (or more) to be able to handle 3 film music projects.

OK, now that you have your 10 sheet templates all ready to go, imagine that you’re ready to “staff up” for a new film music project. To get started, you simply need decide who your collaborators are going to be, and then invite each of them into your collaboratorium. Inviting an individual is simply a matter of having SmartSheet send her or him an invitation by Email. You need only specify which smart sheets you want the invitee to be able to access (and the desired level of access privileges), type in an Email address, and click the Share button.

By responding to the SmartSheet-generated Email invitation, the invitee automatically gets a SmartSheet account and access to the set of sheets you’ve authorized. Every invitee’s account is free – so the person you want to bring into your collaboratorium has no financial disincentive in joining the team.

As if that weren’t enough, the number of invited collaborators you can have is unlimited!

Of course, as a paying SmartSheet subscriber and sheet creator, you have privileges that invitees don’t have. You’re the owner of each smart sheet you create, which gives only you the ability to delete or rename any sheet as well as certain more advanced privileges. You control who else can access that sheet and what each of these individuals can do with it (view only, restricted editing, or full editing). Through these exclusive rights you’re able to maintain control over the rules by which your team operates.

More Goodies
I don’t have time or space enough to tell you about all the other things SmartSheet can do. Fortunately, it will be easy for you to learn on your own, because SmartSheet is so simple in concept, intuitive to use, and well-documented. It seems almost to hold your hand as you work, often anticipating what you’ll want to do next.

But just to whet your appetite, let me touch very briefly on just a few other cool features that I haven’t mentioned elsewhere:

Spreadsheet. Although SmartSheet is far more than a spreadsheet program, a smart sheet is, nonetheless, able to function as a spreadsheet.

File Attachment. You can attach files to any smart sheet row. When attaching a file, a copy of the file you specify is stored in the cloud, along with the rest of the smart sheet’s data. It becomes an integral part of the sheet, and collaborators who have access to the sheet can easily view it, download it, etc.

Time Management. SmartSheet builds in calendars, reminders, other features that help you plan a project, monitor its status relative to plan, and stay on top of who needs to do what, and when. If you’ve entered a series of project milestones on a smart sheet you use for scheduling your project, SmartSheet will instantly generate a calendar view for you that makes it easier to comprehend your schedule in visual terms.

Discussions. A discussion can be added to any smart sheet row. This feature captures collaborator comments pertinent to any item the team is focusing upon and maintains an easily-displayed history of who said what, when.

Reports. With a few mouse clicks, you can specify and generate a report that abstracts key information from your project’s set of smart sheets, affording you a quick, customizable, high-level view of what’s happening in your project, what problems might be developing, and what needs to be done next.

Integration With Other Tools. SmartSheet is integrated with a number of other popular tools and environments, such as Google Docs, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, and Jott. Several file import and export functions support moving information between SmartSheet and your computer’s local file system, if you want to do so. You can publish a smart sheet (even to non-collaborators) by embedding it into any web page, with a few mouse clicks. Many SmartSheet features generate Emails automatically, making it easy to communicate critical information to people both inside and outside of your team, and to collect information from them, often in a way that automatically enters collected information into a smart sheet – where it can then be further analyzed.

Archiving. SmartSheet builds in a means of archiving the entire content of a group of smart sheets into a file, which can then be downloaded from the cloud onto your local computer. This gives you the ability to free up the smart sheets you’ve been using for a given project when the project has been completed, without losing the data they contained. Archived smart sheets can then be deleted, adding to your pool of unused sheets. When you start a new project, you can draw from this pool, effectively re-using the affected part of your sheet allotment (otherwise, you’d have to pay an increasing monthly fee for a steadily-increasing allotment of smart sheets).

The Future Is Now
I think sooner or later, everybody’s going to be doing it. SmartSheet and similar collaboratory innovations will become a ubiquitous feature of the composer’s competitive landscape. Differentiating yourself in this aspect of the business will then boil down to: How good of a collaboratory insfrastructure can you dream up, design, and implement?

I’m not going to tell you exactly how to do it – nor should I, because I think you can apply your own creative and business chops here. I have given you the big picture, more than enough to get going. And there’s plenty more that SmartSheet can do for you that I haven’t even had time to mention. So dig in.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, don’t expect SmartSheet or a comparable competitor to fulfill all of your collaboration needs. You’ll need to mix it together in a creative way with other tools, technologies, and methods. For example, you’ll probably still want to use a videoconferencing tool/service such as Skype, Adobe ConnectNow, or iChat Theater. You’ll still need means of sharing film video clips, cue audio files, MIDI, DAW project databases and the like. And so on.

But you also need glue, and that’s where something like SmartSheet comes in.

(Jim Well is an independent SmartSheet user and has no affiliation with smartsheet.com.)

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JIM WELL is the author of SCOREcast’s Inside the Outside column. As a developing, mostly self-taught composer, Jim is a skilled MIDI practitioner, guitarist, and wind controller artist. You can find his SCOREcast bio (and links to his other sites) here.