Blender Studio releases Watchtower
Blender Studio has released Watchtower, a simple free visual production tracking tool for film and animation.
The web application displays the current edit of a video in sync with data on the timing of a shot, its position within sequences, the task types involved, their completion status, and the artists assigned to it.
A simple visual tool for tracking the production status of movies and animations
Developed for use in production on Sprite Fright, the studio’s latest animated ‘open movie’, Watchtower began life as a Blender add-on before evolving into a web application.
The tool provides a visual overview of the progress of a production, with a timeline along the foot of the screen showing the current edit, including the individual shots and their grouping into sequences.
Tracks below the shot timeline show which departments – storyboard, layout, and so on, all the way through to rendering and compositing – are involved, with colour coding to indicate the progress of the work.
A grid view at the top of the screen can be used to display shot thumbnails or production assets – again, colour-coded to indicate completion status – with the option to filter them by sequence or task type.
Watchtower can fetch data from Kitsu, CGWire’s open-source production tracking tool via its Zou API, or from JSON files, for integration with other task management software.
Licensing and system requirements
Watchtower is available free under a GPL licence. It uses JavaScript framework Vue.js. You can find installation instructions here.
Read more about Watchtower in Blender Studio’s blog post
(Includes a link to an online demo using production data from Sprite Fright)