Asset Costing

Dreamworks Animation
PROJECT

Asset Costing

Dreamworks Animation
Dreamworks Animation

Asset Costing is a software development project that seeks to provide Production Management a way to easily answer how “expensive” the Studio’s Assets are in creation and use during a Show’s production.

Asset Costing Sequence Landing Page

OVERVIEW

Asset Costing is a software development project that seeks to provide Production Management a way to easily answer how “expensive” the Studio’s Assets are in creation and use during a Show’s production.  It aims to facilitate the exploration, discovery, and comparison of complex data relationships that revolve around the generation and usage of Assets in production with a key emphasis on performance and quality.

The initial targeted users were department Supervisors, but in my design process I proposed to add Executives as well.  The data presented in the tool is useful to a variety of users as long as it "rolled up" and communicated to them in the appropriate ways.

These mockups were create over 2-3 days based on a brief pitch from the Project Lead and user research of a few key stakeholders.

PROBLEM

Create a tool that allows studio leadership to visualize production costs and overages at the show and asset level by utilizing data gathered from render farm metrics

RESPONSIBILITIES

Product Designer
Including: Information Architecture, User Research, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping

RESULT

MVP deployed

STATUS

Deployed

REQUIREMENTS

PROJECT PROFILE

INSPIRATION

INSPIRATION

In general, but also more visible in this project, is my design influence by the work of Neville Brody and Nike. I'm a long-time fan of both because of their playfulness with composition and typography, use of contrast, imagery, and most importantly their constant juxtaposition/integration of structure and chaos.

(click image to see more)

Asset Costing Sequence Landing Page

SEQUENCE VIEW A

SEQUENCE VIEW A

This is a possible entry point for the user.  The general design philosophy here is to user the top portion of the frame to be a place for visual references or navigation of the data, while the lower part is a more straight-forward display of various metrics.

This main screen also is able to be adjusted to accommodate other user types, like Executives.  Here I'm presenting metrics across all the shots in sequence 900 in one axis, and all the departments contributing to those shots in a second axis of the spreadsheet at the bottom.  This data is rolled up in the the Gantt chart at the top.  I could just as easily plot all the sequences of a movie in the same way.  Or even all movies in a year.

As we "zoom" out, the data becomes more relevant to an executive.  As we "zoom" in, it is more relevant to a Supervisor or artist.  But whether we zoom out or in, the design remains constant.

SEQUENCE VIEW B

SEQUENCE VIEW B

This is an optional mode in the top portion of the UI that helps create visual context for the data on the bottom.  Seeing as how was built for film production, the visual representation is from a movie.  Alternate visual representations could be inserted here depending on the type of analysis being done.

ASSET VIEW B

ASSET VIEW B

As we "zoom" in and traverse the strata of data, we can arrive at this level, the shot Asset Level.  We've moved from a Sequence, to a shot, and now to an Asset.  A molecular component of movie making.  At this level we can surface relevant data points to technical artists and Supervisor to better help them understand how long it takes an Asset to render/process before resulting in an image.  Memory usage, disk usage, rasterization times, etc.  This information, plus the information at the Shot and Sequence levels help determine how much these assets cost and how to balance out their cost vs. their quality.