Gantt what's?

 The Charts and what?

Now this name sounds confusing and trust me it gets more bizarre in visuals but we shall persevere and try nonetheless. So when we talk about production schedules we might normally go to things like shot log and things similar to them too, however where this differs is the detail and the actual list itself its more dedicated to time management and dedication.

In terms of what you can relate it too, think of a bar chart that you might use for quantities of things, on the left hand side (or the y-axis) shows what tasks need to be done and along the bottom (x-axis) how long you want to spend on a particular task for that time and can help you plan for overlap in the tasks that you want to complete.

By completing this chart you can get a clearer picture of how long each stage of production will last and how to divide your staff in the most effective way to make sure the production reaches the maximum potential that you see it becoming.

So what did I do for my production? Well in the image below you can see how I structured my Gantt chart.

So how I structured this is different to the industry standard similar to the one above in a few quickly identifiable ways like for example actual structure of the chart itself isn't built how you'd expect without any real way of telling the weeks into production. However we do have good methods of structure such as the separation of the production itself in its three stages (pre, main, and post) a structure that shows what fits into where such as the back-ups incase of emergency and how they would fit into the production process if they're needed. 

It's always a good idea to have a contingency plan drawn up in the case that say your location loses its time slot then you have something that you know that you can go to and use which always helps, making sure that the plan has blocks on the chart to make sure that they have a suitable amount of time dedicated to them to make sure that they have the same effect as the main idea.

Now one thing that could be potentially confusing from the way that I have used the chart is the coloring system as this could be misleading to the outside perspective, so I could have made two separate charts one for the main idea production and the other for the contingency but having the two in different shades on the same doc has a better demonstration for how the contingency would fit into the initial plan for the main video idea.

To make a long story short, when you use a Gantt chart make sure that you have plan and idea of where you want it to go and how you want the plan to work together. The chart itself is more for a visual representation of how you would structure the the production itself across days and how long each section of the production would take across each day.

Hopefully this has shown about how Gantt charts are used in the production process and how one is built.

Have a great day!