Shotgun API: Streamlining The Creative Process

Candice McMillan, March 7th, 2013

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When it comes to the course of creativity, some kind of order and management can turn a good idea into something successful and highly profitable. Having an effective tool that handles all the loose ends so creatives can focus on creating, can only mean better results at the end of the day. Shotgun is a service aimed at helping creative studios run smoothly and efficiently by providing the necessary tools to see a project to completion. Shotgun’s API allows developers to access this functionality and easily integrate it with other applications.

Shotgun provides tools and features that benefit everyone in a creative agency, from artists and managers to supervisors and developers. Here’s how it works:

• Users can track the projects they’re working on, organise specific projects and tasks into pages and access information quickly using powerful search tools.
• The service provides tools that allow users to create and manage practical schedules, keeping track of who is working on what. It also provides a handy timeline that makes it possible to schedule important project phases and milestones, helping the user to see how the project is going, and based on that data, how to better allocate time to the next project for ultimate efficiency.
• Managers can also easily review, annotate and make notes on projects that artists have submitted, and send them back to be adjusted accordingly.
• The service offers practical collaboration tools that allow everyone working on the project to communicate and collaborate effectively.

Shotgun provides a lightweight Python API that makes it quick and easy for for developers to write code that accesses a studio’s production data. The folks at Shotgun say,

“Using the simple Python-based API, you can quickly get your scripts integrated with Shotgun. Because the needs of every studio can prove to be very different, we don’t do a lot of “automation” or “smarts” in our API. We have kept it pretty low-level and leave most of those decisions to you.”

Further information is available on Shotgun’s website.