TillyGen and Trello

What this is about

Trello is kanban at its plainest: boards, lists, cards, drag to move. Small production outfits use it for the operational to-dos around a shoot — book the van, confirm the location owner, charge the batteries, return the lenses. What keeps a Trello board healthy is staying out of planning territory: the moment cards try to encode shooting order or scene dependencies, the board collapses into a puzzle. TillyGen holds that structure instead, and a practical Trello trick bridges the two: paste multiple lines of text into a new card and Trello offers to make one card per line.

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:

• Copy rows from the TillyGen CSV, paste them into a Trello list, and accept the one-card-per-line prompt — the to-do board fills itself
• One checklist per shoot day on a single card beats twenty scattered cards for gear, transport and catering
• The card 'current plan' holds nothing but the TillyGen link and the latest call sheet PDF — it never moves columns
• Labels by department let the gaffer filter the board to what concerns the gaffer

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Create a board per production with the classic three lists — to do, doing, done — and resist adding a fourth until it hurts.
2. Derive operational tasks from the TillyGen plan: everything that must be booked, confirmed, picked up or returned becomes a card.
3. Use the paste trick for bulk: copy task rows from the exported CSV into a list and confirm one card per line.
4. Give each shoot day one card with a checklist — call time confirmed, gear packed, route checked — ticked off the evening before.
5. Keep a pinned-style 'current plan' card holding the TillyGen link and latest call sheet, and renew its attachment whenever the plan changes.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• The board mutates into a shot list — cards for scenes, cards for shots — and now two structures describe the same shoot differently
• Done-cards get deleted instead of archived, erasing the only record of who confirmed the location and when

With TillyGen

Trello carries the errands, TillyGen carries the plan that generates them. A card may say 'book the crane for Tuesday' — why Tuesday, and for which shots, is the plan's answer.

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.