Years ago, Pixel Workshop had a regular, steady ad agency client. This particular agency was run by an owner who had, shall we say, a strong personality. Very creative guy, but he was always the smartest guy in the room (just ask him and he'd tell you) and wasn't in the least bit collaborative.
This was very frustrating for us, because we pride ourselves on being creative partners, not just button-pushers. We're a project studio, not a post house. But you adapt to every client, and in this case we quickly learned to simply do exactly what was asked of us, nothing more, nothing less. A bit demoralizing, but it paid the bills.
One day, one of his people called, in a tizzy. "I'm sending someone over to pick up a copy of that project you did for us. We've got a presentation this afternoon, and we can't find our copy!"
Now, normally we don't let our only copy of a project out the door, but in this case the client was in crisis mode, so we let them have it, reminding them to please, please, return the tape right away.
You can see where this is going, right? Nine months go by, and the tape hasn't been returned. We're busy with other projects, and have stopped asking for it back. It's just fallen off our radar.
My phone buzzes. It's the agency owner on the phone.
"Hey," he says, "we need you to make a copy of that project we did. I've got a client coming this week and I want to show it to them."
"I'd love to," I reply, "but you've still got our master. Remember, you needed it desperately, and it never got returned to us."
"WHAT?!? Look, I KNOW we returned that %^$%$@#ing tape to you, and you'd better *&^%#ing find it."
This line of conversation went on for a little while (I never lost my cool, to my credit) and honestly, soon I was actually doubting myself. Had the tape actually been returned? Maybe it had, and I just didn't know it. I started looking around in the tape library, just in case it got dropped off and filed without my knowledge. Nope, not there, not anywhere in the shop.
Eventually, after much back and forth, someone at his agency found our master, in his shop. Disaster averted, although he never did apologize for his behavior. (It's been my experience that people with that temperament rarely do...)
I vowed to never find myself in that situation again, so I built a tape library database in Filemaker Pro to keep track of all of our assets. Every tape gets a number and detailed description, and the database is set up to print labels and even to print directly on to CDs and DVDs. But most importantly, each database entry has a "current location" and "signed out by..." field, so whenever a physical piece of media leaves our shop there's a record of it entered in the database. Even stuff going off site forever gets labeled "client permanent" so we have a record of how many copies were sent out, and when.
In the years since I started this database it has been extremely helpful countless times, especially when a client calls asking about a particular piece of media or a raw footage tape, and we can quickly look it up in the database and tell them, "Yep...I have a record here that Bob Smith signed out that tape on January 23rd, 2004, and it never came back." Having such thorough records means they rarely argue. We've never had anyone threaten to sue us for losing a tape or anything like that, but our record keeping would surely work in our favor should anything like that ever arise.
And, of course, having everything labeled and numbered makes it much easier to find tapes and other media when needed. Look it up in the database, go where it tells you, find the number, bingo - it's there.
Of course, we're quickly heading toward a tapeless production environment. I've budgeted for a Sony EX-1, and I wonder how I'm going to adjust the database to deal with tapeless long-term storage of media. Any ideas?
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