More help is on the way!

So yesterday I met with Janeen Levin, one of our producers (listed just above Spike Jonze @ $12.01) who responded to our newsletter job posting. I had already hired Gianelle, but Janeen has a ton of experience  with IT development, and has project managed tech development for companies like Microsoft, Ebay, and several internet startups. I decided to allocate some of our limited budget toward having Janeen manage our websites development, which honestly should be a full-time job, and has been a bit overwhelming for me. I have already learned more than I ever wanted to know about open-source CMS, HTML, PHP, Apache servers, CRMs, MySQL databases, round-robin DNS servers, etc. I'm really just a stop-motion animator, so dealing with all this tech has been a slow learning curve. But as this project became increasingly internet based, it was necessary tho learn.

Janeen has branched out of the IT field, and has been learning the ins and outs of film producing. She is basically looking to make films she believes in, and this is one of them, so she has offered to help us out. I'm looking forward to having someone help with a lot of the tech. The goal is to adapt a lot of the technology that is out there into something we can use to make a collaborative film. 

We still have a lot of web development, both short term and long term, in order to complete this project. Janeen and I went over the 6 page list I had put together for Jason. We are going to be improving some of the collaborative community features of our current site as well as developing an interactive site for our road-trip. We are just drawing out plans for our road trip as the summer approaches. We are starting to aim for a mid-september launch, and will be working backward from there. Janeen will be helping manage many of our web projects, as well as other production related tasks.

So, we are building a team here. I'm really excited that we found two great people from our existing producers. I had thought we might have to put a job listing on craigs list and reach out to a larger pool of applicants, but with over 7,400 producers, we have a pretty good crew from which to pull from. We will be mobilizing our crew even more as we move forward.

best,

n