TillyGen and Basecamp

What this is about

Basecamp organizes a project into a few deliberate rooms: a message board for announcements, to-do lists for commitments, Docs & Files for documents, and a campfire for quick chat. Studios use it with clients precisely because it resists complexity — the client sees a tidy project, not a tool to learn. In that arrangement, TillyGen is the workshop behind the storefront. The plan is built there; what the client needs to see — schedule, storyboard, call sheet — crosses over as exported PDFs, and what the client must do becomes a to-do with a date.

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:

• Each plan milestone becomes a message board post with the exported PDF attached — the announcement and the document travel as one
• Client obligations from the plan — approve the location, deliver the product samples — turn into Basecamp to-dos with due dates from the schedule
• Docs & Files keeps the approved plan versions; the working state stays one link away in TillyGen
• Campfire questions about times or shots get answered with a pointer to the current PDF, not with a typed-out guess

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Set up the Basecamp project with the client and agree that plans arrive as message board posts — one post per milestone, PDF attached.
2. Export the schedule and storyboard from TillyGen after each planning round and post them with a three-line summary of what changed.
3. Translate every client obligation in the plan into a to-do with a due date; the schedule dictates the dates, Basecamp chases the person.
4. File approved versions under Docs & Files so the paper trail of what the client saw and accepted stays complete.
5. Answer plan questions in campfire by linking the current post — if the answer is not in the PDF, update the plan and re-post.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Plan details renegotiated in campfire chat and never carried into TillyGen — the shoot follows the plan, the client remembers the chat
• Old plan PDFs left in Docs & Files without a version note, so the client reviews whichever file they open first

With TillyGen

Basecamp is the client's window; TillyGen is the room behind it. Everything the window shows is an export, and every agreement made at the window is written back into the room.

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.