How to bridge the asset management gap

There’s a common issue felt across all verticals — whether you’re in preproduction for a show that’s still thriving season after season, designing a line of cars inspired by generations past, or trying to recall exactly what color you used in a clothing line from 10 years ago.

When the assets you need aren’t where you need them, when you need them, you inevitably end up having to send follow-ups and playing catch-up after your meetings and creative reviews. Locating assets bogs down your day with distracting menial tasks and ultimately delays critical decisions and progress.

So, how do you access your assets at the moment you need them and avoid having to meet after your meetings? It starts with a digital asset management solution to store and share files. But it doesn’t end with a DAM solution.

Check out how one production company bridged the asset management gap.

Five nations worth of content

The upcoming graphic novel from the Bureau of Magic titled Five Nations: The Age of Atlantis is a story about humanity surviving the last age of climate change and the heroes who helped them do it. It celebrates life’s resilience in the face of its ultimate challenge.

“I’ve been dreaming about this project for most of my life,” said Mark Warshaw, co-founder and president of the Bureau of Magic. And with this life-long dream coming to fruition came a serious need to wrangle a massive amount of content that’s been lying in wait for decades.

Image credit: Bluescape

Bringing it all in

Warshaw and his team faced the gargantuan task of finding and sharing pivotal assets from 25 years’ worth of creative development with the production team. With all of that content spread across drives and computers, collecting assets that serve as direction and inspiration was laborious and time-consuming. This made it difficult to communicate their creative vision and make decisions. Even worse, if a file wasn’t labeled correctly 25 years ago — and let’s be real, it probably wasn’t — it might as well be extinct.

A lot of people use a DAM solution, or cloud storage and file-sharing solutions, to share files with collaborators. But it’s too distracting and interruptive to stop a meeting and search your DAM, download a file, and then share it to answer a question or request for clarification. You’ll need a more immediate way to search and review assets at the moment to avoid stalling your creative momentum and getting stuck in the weeds.

Warshaw and his team vouched for the trusty “work smarter, not harder” route and connected their shared folders to Bluescape, a secure virtual workspace that is simultaneously lightweight and powerful, so that they could save time by quickly searching for and sharing assets in the flow of the meeting to propel creative momentum instead of stopping it.

The Bureau of Magic team can instantly recall assets when collaborating in Bluescape to rally around a creative vision in less time with less back and forth for optimum productivity.

"What this allows is more spontaneity to occur in the midst of the creation process,” Warshaw said.

They now ideate on the layout, background, and character designs for Five Nations in real time, saving hours by eliminating the tangled web of follow-up emails with buried assets and next steps .

Results of Jurassic proportions

After the Bureau of Magic began using its DAM solution with Bluescape, the team saved time by coming to decisions more quickly. And because they were able to come to those decisions faster and align on creative direction, they could then progress directly to executing that vision instead of being distracted by endless follow-ups.

The Bureau of Magic team can easily pull reference material from their DAM into their workspace to address creative issues in real time and see parts of the big picture that might have otherwise been missed, sparking new ideas to bring the lost world of Atlantis to life.

“The artists understood the vision immediately,” Warshaw said. “It felt like we were always one step ahead because all the concept art collected through the years was pulled up so easily. We’re communicating and ‘clicking’ way quicker than we would if we were just sending emails back and forth.”

Bluescape supports integrations with Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Adobe Stock, and Adobe Workfront. Check out how Bluescape can integrate with your DAM here and get a behind-the-scenes look at Five Nations in this blog post.

Megan Ranger is a copywriter at Bluescape. Ranger is a creative marketing professional with a passion for product marketing, SEO, and creative writing. She takes a human approach to challenges and strives for a collaborative, team-oriented process with positive results.