Tilt Creative + Production stays aligned while working remotely using Float

Tilt Creative + Production got its start in 2018 when long-time business partners Ron Carey, Stacey Murphy, and Dave Trownwell decided to merge a creative ad agency with a full-service video production company.

From their creative studio in Virginia, US, they have created captivating ads for well-known brands like Walmart, Capital One, and Audi. They have recently expanded to making documentaries and filming music videos.  

Their production and post-production teams rely on Float to handle year-long, 1000+ deliverable campaigns and manage projects with quick turnarounds.

They went remote unexpectedly and needed a resource management tool stat!

Angela Faunce Leaf, the Executive Producer of Integrated Production at Tilt Creative + Production, had just started her role when the business shut down because of COVID—and everyone suddenly had to work from home.

While the post-production team adjusted quickly to a fully online work setup, Angela was facing a fresh and unexpected challenge: how to plan projects and resourcing her new team moving forward.

Everybody pivoted pretty well to working remotely. That part wasn’t hard. The difficult part was figuring out how to keep track of everything and know who was doing what.

Unfortunately, the resourcing tool they had been using until that point offered no answers. It was great for booking physical facilities, but it was not suited to scheduling people’s time.

Luckily for everybody involved, Angela had used Float in her previous role and immediately suggested that her team start using it for resource management.

Float met my needs perfectly at my last agency. So when I came over to Tilt and then we shut down, it was exactly what we needed.

Initially, only the post-production team of 15 people (editors, animators, sound designers, and producers within Tilt Creative + Production) used Float.

Then, the production team—who handle video creation before passing it on to Angela’s team—was so impressed by how well Float worked that they started using it too.

Because it worked great in our smaller group, other people began asking: Can we get in on that?

Tilt Creative + Production stays aligned using Float while working remotely

Float has been instrumental in keeping the post-production team in sync for the past four years.

Angela and her team run weekly status meetings to review all work planned in Float and add context if needed. The visual schedule makes it easy to see who is overbooked and facilitates conversations about workload distribution.

Communication is often the toughest part of Angela’s role, and Float helps her get the message across to her remote team.

We can talk about it, we can email about it, we can have meetings about it. But you can also just go and look at the plans in Float; it takes that barrier down. Float is pretty close to being the single source of truth. If a project is not in there, someone forgot to add it to Float.

Video projects often have quick turnaround times with different departments in the production line. Meeting deadlines is determined by how fast you can receive and pass the baton to the next team.

Because Angela can see the production team’s project timelines in Float, setting them up for success is much easier. She can determine what people might be required from her team beforehand and schedule tasks accordingly.

Now we can see that this [project] is shooting on a specific day. That helps me with resourcing my team. I know when certain people will be tied up on the production part versus post-production.

And even if she’s unsure of the exact time a resource would be needed, she plans ahead by creating a tentative project in Float and using placeholders. When she gets more details, she looks for team members who have the bandwidth and assigns work to them.

Float has reduced friction. There’s a lot less frustration and less confusion about who’s working on what, which greatly eases the initial stages of a project.