The Animators Get Back to Full Speed

Point Made Animation is a full service production studio that delivers compelling videos for educational, commercial, and entertainment purposes. While both founders have been in the business for decades, they found themselves losing efficiency in the myriad of new technology available. We talked with Co-CEO David Grupper about his ever-shifting business.

Our initial conversation revolved around finding better ways to streamline your digital assets. How would you explain the predicament you were in?

Point Made Animation was about to get very busy with a 30-video curriculum project for California Community Colleges. Our infrastructure was becoming problematic. We were using an external drive for shared resources and duplicating our backups manually using a Drobo and Google Drive. It was all very confusing, including our systems of naming and organizing projects. Our various email accounts, addresses and calendars were also a tangled mess.

We made a few big shifts, such as upgrading your storage and backup system as well as building a cloud-based sharing platform between you and your production partner. How’s it running these days?

We now have a seamless operation. Our computers are booting and operating efficiently from solid-state drives, we are sharing resources across several PCs and Macs, we can find files when we need them and everything is backed up both to the cloud and to a storage drive.

You mentioned earlier you were rolling out a major video series for a university system in California. How’d it turn out?

We completed that project well within the very tight deadline, thanks in large part to Robbie's help. And we’ve been getting more Ed Tech work since then. I have to admit I was resistant to making changes, but we have not regretted taking your advice. Your approach to simplifying things has really paid off.