TillyGen and Asana

What this is about

Asana manages work as tasks with owners and due dates — projects, sections, assignees, a timeline. A film production needs that machinery most after the shoot: edits, versions, subtitles, cutdowns and delivery all have deadlines and owners. The pre-production side has different needs — dependencies between scenes, shots and days — which is why it stays in TillyGen. The CSV export bridges the handover: deliverables and post tasks derived from the plan are imported into Asana, with due dates taken from the delivery schedule the client already approved.

An integration is good when nobody talks about it any more: the data is where it is needed and nobody exports anything.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Asana's CSV importer maps columns to task fields — name, assignee, due date — so the deliverable list from TillyGen arrives structured, not retyped
• Import deliverables and post steps, not every single shot: thirty cutdown tasks are useful, three hundred shot tasks are noise
• Due dates in Asana descend from the delivery dates in the TillyGen schedule — one source for every deadline the client ever heard
• The schedule PDF attached to the Asana project explains why the deadlines are what they are

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. While still in prep, define deliverables in TillyGen — formats, versions, delivery dates — because the shoot must cover what post will need.
2. After the shoot, export the deliverable and task data as CSV and run it through Asana's importer, mapping columns to assignee and due date.
3. Sort tasks into sections by phase — edit, review, finishing, delivery — and attach the TillyGen schedule PDF as context.
4. Track post-production in Asana from here; when a client moves a delivery date, change it in the TillyGen plan first, then adjust the affected tasks.
5. At delivery, close the project and note deviations — they sharpen the next production's plan in TillyGen.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Deadlines maintained twice — once in the plan, once in Asana — drifting apart until the client hears two different delivery dates
• Importing the raw shot list as tasks: hundreds of items nobody assigns, and the real deliverables drown among them

With TillyGen

TillyGen owns everything up to the last shooting day, including the delivery dates; Asana owns the execution of post against those dates. The CSV import is the baton pass, and it happens once, deliberately.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.