🎥 Building a Home screen layout to track your editing pipeline

Light Blue’s Home Screen is based on a flexible layout of widgets that show the information that’s most important to you. Different layouts can be used for different purposes, for example a financial overview or focusing on enquiry management, so why not build a layout to show you the status of your ongoing workload?

Using saved queries to categorise your shoots you can group shoots that are at different stages of completion together and view them all at once. Queries could be based on workflow steps, whether or not a shoot’s been tagged or if a custom field has a specific setting.

Using a custom field like a secondary status that can show whatever you like is the easiest way to get going with this concept. You can update that field with whichever stage the job is up to and see all the records in that stage within the right section of your Home Screen layout.

Follow the step by step guide to setting up and using a Home Screen layout to track your shoot pipeline.

Walkthrough video

Steps covered in this video:

1. Set up a Shoot Custom Text field as a field to record your “Edit Stage”
2. Make sure it’s a “Combobox”
3. Spend a little time thinking about the “stages” you’d like to record, list them in a text file
4. Create a number of blank shoots (one for each stage), enter one of the stages in the custom field for each shoot, this way they’re “remembered” by the custom field in future.
5. Mark those shoots as cancelled so they aren’t showing as open enquiries any more – don’t delete them.
6. Create a query to find all shoots at a particular stage
7. Repeat for all stages
8. Create a Home screen layout that shows the results of those queries
9. Add the appropriate stage information to each of your current shoot records
10. Observe those records appearing in the queries on the home screen layout

Using a different Shoot Custom Text field or different “stages” to the ones listed

If you’re using a different custom text field and/or different “stages” to the ones listed in the video, the simplest approach is to build your own queries and home screen layout following the steps in the video, rather than downloading the example layout below.

Installing the Home screen layout in to your own account

To install the Home screen layout that was built in the video, follow the steps below:

1. Download the layout file from here.
2. In Light Blue’s Home screen, click on the options cog in the top right corner, choose Home Screen Layout Editing, then Import Home Screen Layout and select the file you downloaded.
3. The layout and associated saved queries will be imported in to your account
4. Open Light Blue’s preferences screen and go to the Custom Fields section
5. In the Shoot Custom Text tab, set Shoot Custom Text 1 to “Edit stage”, set it as a “Combobox” field.
   If this custom field is already in use, you’ll need to use a different Shoot Custom Text Field
6. If you’re using the same “stages” as listed in the video, create 8 blank shoot records and populate each one with one of the “stages” so that it’s stored for future use.
7. Mark the shoots you created in step 6 as cancelled.
8. Go through your current shoots and update the custom field to reflect the stage that they’re at.

Getting help

If you need help or have questions, please don’t hesitate to send us an email or book a free 1:1 call.