Unexpected Shotgun

Keying off the awesome Costume Approvals thread, I wanted to see if anyone else had made some fun or unexpected uses of Shotgun.

My wife is an archaeologist, and I thought it’d be fun to try and map the work done on an archaeological dig using Shotgun. Here’s the Overview:

Turns out the sheer amount of data and and physical objects (i.e. artifacts) collected each day is much akin to the data collection that needs to happen on a movie set to make sure the subsequent VFX work is easier to hand off. We set up different custom entities and created relationships between them. We were also able to set up an artifact pipeline, since each find needs to be washed, catalogued, drawn and/or photographed, tagged and bagged.

That’s it! Curious to hear who else has found interesting uses for Shotgun :).

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Oh that’s very cool! We’re starting to use Shotgun here to help with “micro-theme park” production, which is partially some physically-tangible deliverables (like printed wall decor), and partially some more traditional deliverables in the Shotgun sense, like video or interactive games, etc. But that’s not as far outside the box as archeology!

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Wow—awesome! Keep us in the loop on how that turns out. It’s always fun to mix it up and make actual, real-world things vs everything digital.

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Didn’t someone track recipes or something food related? @tommy.kiser, I’m looking at you…

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@johnny.duguid, the Shotgun team have our own internal food site for tracking restaurant recommendations! @tony’s been maintaining it, but it’s a group effort for sure =)

I think @elirarey uses Shotgun for some sort of film list, too?

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I’m using SG to help my brother-in-law track all of the characters in Shakespeare’s works. He’s an English teacher and spends half of his time on film theory and the other half on teaching Shakespeare, so it’s a big part of his life.

A lot of characters show up in different plays, and at different times will have:

  • different names (how they’re referred to by other characters, nicknames, etc)
  • different titles (lines of dialogue will refer to a character by their title instead of name, and titles will/can change, like when a baron becomes a duke)

Additionally, different characters can have the same name/title reference (one person is the earl of something-or-other and later his son inherits that title).

We’re making use of a lot of Custom Entities and setting up multi-entity and single-entity relationships to track the actual character, their appearances (and how they appear), their title(s), the play(s) they’re in, familial relationships (parents, offspring, siblings, and spouses), and status errata like ‘unverified’, ‘not appearing’ (e.g. not in a play but an important person, relationship-wise), and others.

Mostly it’s been a bit of a brain-bender to try and figure out what the proper schema should be, and how to track the information properly so that it can be seen from multiple angles, like “how many titles did Edward Plantagenet have?”, “how many people have been King Richard?”, and “in which plays does King Henry IV appear?”. We did eventually get it sorted and now it’s just a matter of putting in the information and tracking errata.

It was a lot of fun to put together, and I’m glad we did it! It’s definitely the most unique usage I’ve encountered yet.

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Oh, and I’m also personally using SG to track production of a webcomic (TBA), and using it to track the progress of various pieces of art (plongitudes.com) that I have that are in-process. I will work on one for a while and switch to something else when I need to change gears, which leads to some finished pieces, but others that gather dust as other ideas pop into my head. Remembering which ones are incomplete has just recently started to be an issue and it’s something that SG is helping me keep on top of so that I can be more efficient.

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We use Shotgun for the Visual Effects Society Awards. We use it as the database for a custom HTML front-end which users submit their entries, then use the Shotgun front-end to review all the materials for issues, and track the progress of each issue and entry. It helps a distributed team manage hundreds of entries every year.

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That’s awesome and makes me so happy.

And welcome to the forums, Dennis! :blush:

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