This year we did a “Shark-Tank” themed Hackathon, where Shotgunners pitched their projects and ideas to a panel of judges before we all casted our votes for the Best User Facing idea, Best Internal idea, and Wackiest idea.
Be sure to check out who won at the end of the post!
Here's what we built:
This team took a stab at creating a new field type called, “Calculated”, which allows users to write simple math, logic, and string formulas that compute values between fields on a single entity. There are still a lot of performance and UX considerations to make before we’d release this, but this Hackathon project served as a killer proof of concept.
Project: Shotgun Project Book
Jack
The Book takes a Shotgun Project and turns it into an eBook. The book is jam-packed full of stuff like notes made on the project, some statistics, as well as highlighting the most prominent images from the project's shots and sequences. It even shows the evolution of the more complex shots, and ends with a "movie barcode" made up of all the versions in the project in the order they were created.
Project: Shotgun Archaeology
Brandon
Brandon’s wife is an archaeologist, and he’s always wondered if Shotgun could be used to track all the work, and finds, from an archaeological dig. Using data from http://opencontext.org/ he mocked up the Areas, Trenches, Loci, and Artifacts catalogued from the Kenan Tepe site in Turkey. While not revolutionary with the data tracking, Brandon’s wife noted that Shotgun’s ability to assign and track work as it related to the site and artifacts would go a long way towards keeping everything better organized on a dig.

Project: Video Chat within Shotgun via Google Hangouts
Eric, François, Luc

This group created a way for users to launch Google Hangout collaborative review sessions from within Shotgun by clicking on newly inserted camera buttons throughout the site. Clicking the button launches a separate Google Hangout window for each user with an embedded view of Screening Room. Users can share webcams while they review shots together via the Google Hangout and can zoom, pan, resize their players as they’d like.
This team took a stab at creating a new field type called, “Calculated”, which allows users to write simple math, logic, and string formulas that compute values between fields on a single entity. There are still a lot of performance and UX considerations to make before we’d release this, but this Hackathon project served as a killer proof of concept.
Project: Record "Audio notes" over images and playback in Shotgun (IOS and Web)
Hugo, Karine, Sylvain, MC, Alex
Review Audio Notes (™) allows you to record, attach and playback voice comments when reviewing Media in Shotgun. Review Audio Notes works both on the web review app as well as the IOS review app, allowing you to annotate Media with the power of your voice. See this project in action thanks to MC’s outstanding acting skills here!
Hugo, Karine, Sylvain, MC, Alex
Review Audio Notes (™) allows you to record, attach and playback voice comments when reviewing Media in Shotgun. Review Audio Notes works both on the web review app as well as the IOS review app, allowing you to annotate Media with the power of your voice. See this project in action thanks to MC’s outstanding acting skills here!
Project: Shotgun Project Book
Jack
The Book takes a Shotgun Project and turns it into an eBook. The book is jam-packed full of stuff like notes made on the project, some statistics, as well as highlighting the most prominent images from the project's shots and sequences. It even shows the evolution of the more complex shots, and ends with a "movie barcode" made up of all the versions in the project in the order they were created.
Brandon
Brandon’s wife is an archaeologist, and he’s always wondered if Shotgun could be used to track all the work, and finds, from an archaeological dig. Using data from http://opencontext.org/ he mocked up the Areas, Trenches, Loci, and Artifacts catalogued from the Kenan Tepe site in Turkey. While not revolutionary with the data tracking, Brandon’s wife noted that Shotgun’s ability to assign and track work as it related to the site and artifacts would go a long way towards keeping everything better organized on a dig.

Project: Video Chat within Shotgun via Google Hangouts
Eric, François, Luc

This group created a way for users to launch Google Hangout collaborative review sessions from within Shotgun by clicking on newly inserted camera buttons throughout the site. Clicking the button launches a separate Google Hangout window for each user with an embedded view of Screening Room. Users can share webcams while they review shots together via the Google Hangout and can zoom, pan, resize their players as they’d like.
Project: Text Tool and Annotations in Context
Xin
Xin's Text Tool and Annotations in Context project is an attempt at letting users view annotations in context of their media. For creating text annotations, a new text tool was added to write directly on the media. For viewing annotations, a feature was added to open annotations directly on the media while it’s playing. We liked this one so much that we'll be rolling it out to all Shotgun subscribers in a future patch!
Project: SGUIKit: Desktop style HTML/CSS Layout Engine for the web
Owen
Owen looked at improving our ability to manage our expanding code base by building a desktop-style app UI layout engine to help with refactoring HTML, Javascript and CSS. As a proof of concept he rebuilt the new Tracking Settings UI using a basic implementation of the layout engine.
Project: RunDeck
David, Patrick Hubert
David, Patrick Hubert
This team’s project was to install a RUNDECK server to facilitate all our operations on the production servers. This will help the street team to do some operations themselves to provide quicker response time to customers.
Project: Changing Hubot's litter box
Philip
Project: Sublime Text engine for Toolkit
JF
JF focused on creating a generic Toolkit engine that uses XML-RPC as the communication channel between the DCC and Toolkitapps. The complete integration was done inside Sublime Text 3 and supports importing in ascii art versions of Photoshop files.
Tom
Robert
This project consisted of creating a system that gathers logs and relevant execution information for 30 days allowing the Street Team to better investigate issues our customers may be facing. Through an integrated search engine, the Street Team can quickly access operation logs to provide a quicker response. This can also be used to monitor real-time trends and also identify potential issues before they happen.
Project: A Toolkit Tornado Engine
Stephane Deverly
Stephane developed a Toolkit Tornado Engine that launches Toolkit apps from a URL. A new sgtk:// protocol handler allows the apps to be launched from a Shotgun Action Menu Item. The engine can also be used to serve web pages from Toolkit.
Project: A Toolkit Tornado Engine
Stephane Deverly
Stephane developed a Toolkit Tornado Engine that launches Toolkit apps from a URL. A new sgtk:// protocol handler allows the apps to be launched from a Shotgun Action Menu Item. The engine can also be used to serve web pages from Toolkit.
Project: Shotgun Review for Android
Neil
Neil prototyped basic functionality of the iOS mobile review app using 100% cross-platform tools, and ran the app on an Android phone. He used the widely popular Cordova library to build the app in HTML 5 / css / javascript: the same toolset as our browser-based Shotgun client. This approach would make it much easier to develop and maintain mobile apps that run on all platforms.
Neil
Neil prototyped basic functionality of the iOS mobile review app using 100% cross-platform tools, and ran the app on an Android phone. He used the widely popular Cordova library to build the app in HTML 5 / css / javascript: the same toolset as our browser-based Shotgun client. This approach would make it much easier to develop and maintain mobile apps that run on all platforms.
Rob
Rob added Apple Push Notification support to Shotgun so that notifications are sent for everything that shows up in your Shotgun Inbox. Shotgun Promulgation is an OSX menubar app that receives these push notifications and shows you an alert to make it trivial to open the event in Shotgun. For example, if the event is from a Version, you can open the media in Screening Room just by clicking on the notification badge. Even cooler? If the notification is from a note, you can reply right from the notification and skip going to Shotgun entirely.
Eli developed a prototype plugin for the Event Daemon to provide calculated fields inside Shotgun. Using a method similar to Excel, it allows the user to enter a formula directly into the Shotgun field, which is then replaced with a calculated value through Eli’s plugin.
Users can create custom calculated fields.
Then input the desired formula using the custom fields.
Then calculated value is automatically generated.
And the Winners are...
Best User Facing Idea
Fields With Benefits by Ben W., Ben H., and Colin
Best Internal Idea
RunDeck- by David and Patrick Hubert
Wackiest Idea
Shotgun Project Book by Jack
Which ideas would you like to see us release?