Meet Andrew Lawrence – a member of the Shotgun Street team, based out of London.
What was life before Shotgun like?
Prior to joining the Shotgun team, I was working at a number of small to medium sized VFX facilities in London. My primary role was VFX editorial, but the joy of smaller facilities is that you can often wear many hats. I got involved in revamping some of the companies’ shot tracking databases (both Shotgun and non-Shotgun), where I worked alongside the Shotgun support team.
How has your background helped you on the Shotgun team?
Being on the Street team, you interact with clients on a day-to-day basis. Studios work incredibly hard to produce amazing content, however it’s not always smooth sailing en route to that end goal. Having come straight out of facilities working to fix those exact problems, it gives you an overwhelming amount of empathy and understanding of what someone is going through when problems arise. I think it really helps to give constructive and helpful solutions, when you can understand what they are going through, because you’ve been there!
What are you currently working on?
Our top priority on the Street team is to make sure our clients are happy. As the company has grown, it has allowed for us to be more involved with clients’ day-to-day usage of Shotgun, almost like an extended version of their internal pipeline team. It’s really rewarding working closely with studios to help them get the most out of Shotgun, and in turn help them work more efficiently.
What’s a typical day for you like?
A typical day starts with a cup of tea and cranking up some K-Pop tunes! After that I’ll get stuck into our support inbox (this is where you can submit requests to get help 24-hours a day), where we help people with any problems or questions they might have with Shotgun. Once our online support backlog is clear, I’ll usually head into London to meet with studios face-to-face, to tackle some more advanced issues they might have. This could be anything from understanding how the product works, all the way through to sitting down with multiple teams and scoping out their plans for a new 2D pipeline using Shotgun. It’s a really rewarding experience to be involved and play a part in helping implement studio pipelines. If it makes them happy, it makes us happy! :)
What’s your favorite Shotgun feature?
One of my favorite features of Shotgun just got released in our recent 7.4 update - something we are calling big data mode. It allows you to prevent record counts from being automatically calculated and displayed at the bottom of pages in Shotgun, which can result in pages loading up to 10 times faster! Anyone who’s ever tried to load a page of 8 million event log entries knows what I’m talking about here…
What’s something you wish people knew they could do in Shotgun?
There is a treasure trove of advanced configuration in Shotgun that is tucked away under the site preferences, some really cool things that people often don’t know are even there.
Ever wanted to have unique detail pages per asset type? Change the location your media gets uploaded to for faster playback? Or even omit shots of a certain status from your shot hierarchy? I’d highly recommend any site admin spend some time poking through these preferences to really get the most out of Shotgun.
I live and die by keyboard shortcuts to do my job, and Shotgun has plenty of them that often are overlooked. I’m sure everyone has wondered why when you try to add multiple conditions to your filter panel, it refreshes every time a filter is checked. If you Control + click (Command + click on Mac) and select multiple filters, it won’t refresh until you release the key. This is awesome for trying to filter incredibly large datasets with a lot of filters. There are loads more which you can learn about here.
What’s one of the more unique ways you’ve seen Shotgun used?
My favorite way I’ve seen Shotgun used was a facility that implemented a way to make food orders, directly from Shotgun. Anyone who’s ever been working late to hit a deadline knows that take-away is your best friend, and these guys streamlined that process to another level! Find the menu you want in Shotgun, pick what tickles your fancy, hit submit, food arrives and BOOM, you’re fueled and good to go to hit that deadline! It was mouth-watering!
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