TillyGen and Google Drive

What this is about

Google Drive is more than storage for these teams: shared drives keep ownership with the team instead of a person's account, Docs holds the treatment, Sheets holds every working table, and permissions decide what the client sees. TillyGen sits one step earlier — briefing in, then shot list, storyboard, schedule and call sheet out. The exports land in Drive like any other project file, with one advantage over generic storage: a CSV from TillyGen opens directly in Google Sheets, so every department can sort and filter the plan data without touching the plan itself.

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:

• The shot list CSV becomes a filterable Sheet per department — camera sorts by lens, art department filters by set, nobody edits the source
• Plan PDFs open in the browser preview, so a producer on a phone can check the call sheet without downloading anything
• A shared drive separates crew and client folders, and the client folder holds approved PDFs only — never internal working exports
• Feedback arrives as comments on the stored PDF and is carried back into TillyGen as one deliberate change, not scattered edits

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Create a shared drive for the production with separate areas for crew and client, so a wrong share link can never expose internal costs.
2. Export the plan from TillyGen: PDFs for reading, the shot list additionally as CSV for everyone who wants a sortable view.
3. Open the CSV in Google Sheets and save department views — filtered by location, by shoot day, by equipment — as working copies, clearly named as such.
4. Give the client viewer access to approved PDFs only and collect their notes as comments in one place instead of in parallel mail threads.
5. Carry decisions from those comments back into TillyGen, export fresh, and replace the files — the Sheet views get rebuilt from the new CSV in minutes.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• A Sheets copy of the shot list that someone starts editing — two weeks later it is a shadow plan that disagrees with TillyGen on eleven rows
• Permission sprawl: files shared person by person instead of through the drive structure, until nobody knows what the client can actually open

With TillyGen

Drive stores and shares what TillyGen produces; the connected plan — brief to shot list to schedule to call sheet — keeps living in TillyGen. Sheets views are disposable, the plan is not.

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.