Camera, Set, Action: automating film production via Business Process Management

The application of Business Process Management (BPM) technology can provide significant benefits to an organisation in terms of e.g. cost savings and responsiveness to changes. In this paper the application of this technology in the context of film production is investigated. A prototype named YAWL4Film was developed on top of a state-of-the-art BPM system. YAWL4Film supports collection and entering of production-related data and automatic generation of reports required during film production. This system was deployed in two pilot projects at the Australian Film Television and Radio School

Camera, set, action: automating film production via business process management

Teaching-for-creativity is rarely an explicit objective of the learning and assessment process. In Europe, collaborative research projects have been recently set up to address this lack of acknowledgment or explicitness. Australian universities lag behind in this respect. However, Australian HEIs are now showing increasing commitment to creative capacity building as an outcome of undergraduate teaching

A proposal on leveraging workflow technology for building process aware visual analytics system.

Workflow analysis, conducted using both cognitive workflows and process workflows, has been employed to build and improve visual analytics systems. However, workflows and the visual analytics system have to date remained computationally separate. In this paper, we propose that workflow technology be leveraged to create process aware visual analytics systems. We argue that a process aware visual analytics system would be better able to support users, collect provenance information on user activity and track user decision pathways. This will enable visual analytics systems to become process

Distributed orchestration of user interfaces

Workflow management systems focus on the coordination of people and work items, service composition approaches on the coordination of service invocations, and, recently, web mashups have started focusing on the integration and coordination of pieces of user interfaces (UIs), e.g., a Google map, inside simple web pages. While these three approaches have evolved in a rather isolated fashion although they can be seen as evolution of the componentization and coordination idea from people to services to UIs in this paper we describe a component-based development paradigm that conciliates the core strengths of these three approaches inside a single model and language. We call this new paradigm distributed UI orchestration, so as to reflect the mashup-like and process-based nature of our target applications. In order to aid developers in implementing UI orchestrations, we equip the described model and language with suitable design, deployment, and runtime instruments, covering the whole life cycle of distributed UI orchestrations. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Models and systems for managing sensor and crowd-oriented processes

Business process modeling refers to the design of business process models, using business processes languages, to orchestrate the work executed by employees, their interaction with external entities, and work items that are necessary to achieve a predefined goal. Model-driven development allows people, generally called modelers, to design also sophisticated application logic using high-level abstractions. Process modeling is typically connected with business, hence, existing process languages focus principally on the support and orchestration of activities executed by employees, or by external entities like web services. However, there is a wide range of other application logics that are process-driven and that can benefit from high-level abstractions to model low-level details. Our initial research focuses on distributed UIs, which are a distributed type of actors, and then particularly concentrated on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and crowdsourcing, which are distributed and also autonomous types of actors (they can execute a part of an application logic in an autonomous and isolated fashion). Developing applications in these areas requires a deep knowledge of the field and a non-trivial programming effort; domain experts have to code an orchestrate the logic executed by these actors. Since these applications are highly process-driven, domain experts could take advantage of high-level, process-oriented modeling conventions to design the internal logic of these kinds of applications. However, the intrinsic complexity of these domains and the current state of the art of modeling paradigms make the design and execution of processes for these new actors challenging. In this dissertation we analyze, design, and present modeling formalism and systems for managing processes in these contexts. We tackle the challenges of the three areas with an approach that analyzes and extends existing process modeling languages, to enable the design of the processes, and with an architecture, similar for the three focuses, to support the development and execution of processes. Starting from our initial work on the orchestration of distributed UIs, for which we present a modeling language with a set of modeling constructs specific for the UIs, we then present our contribution to WSNs and crowdsourcing domains, which are: a modeling convention for the development of WSN applications, with high-level modeling constructs that abstract the low-level details of the networks; and a modeling paradigm to design processes that are partially executed by a crowd of people. These languages are all equipped with prototypes that contain a modeling tool to design processes and a runtime environment to support the execution. The impact of this work is not only to the domains we focused on but also to the business process domain as we demonstrate how a process modeling is a flexible and suitable formalism to design processes with very diverging, domain-specific requirements

YAWL4Film

In recent years, business process management (BPM) and workflow technology has reached a certain level of maturity, with a great potential to deliver benefits in a wide range of application areas. Nevertheless, it is typically applied by companies with a high adoption level of information technology. As part of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, the BPM Group at Queensland University of Technology decided to explore the potential of applying BPM and workflow technology to the field of screen business. The field of screen business is characterized by business processes with high demands for creativity and flexibility. These processes span a value chain consisting of four major phases: development, preproduction, production, and postproduction. Out of these four phases, production is the most expensive phase in screen business as it is when the movie is actually created and shot. Also, it is during production that the majority of cast and crew are contracted and the majority of equipment and resources utilized. At present, a film production is a highly manual process that requires handling large amounts of heterogeneous data on a daily basis and coordinating many geographically distributed stakeholders. Not surprisingly, such a process is time-consuming and error-prone, and can easily increase the risk of delays in the schedule. Applying a workflow system can provide benefits to the film production process by automating, streamlining, and optimizing the process. YAWL offers such capabilities and moreover its service-oriented architecture facilitates the development of sophisticated extensions to tailor workflow systems to the needs of screen business.</p

Camera, Set, Action: Automating Film Production via Business Process Management

The application of Business Process Management (BPM) technology can provide significant benefits to an organisation in terms of e.g. cost savings and responsiveness to changes. In this paper the application of this technology in the context of film production is investigated. A prototype named YAWL4Film was developed on top of a state-of-the-art BPM system. YAWL4Film supports collection and entering of production-related data and automatic generation of reports required during film production. This system was deployed in two pilot projects at the Australian Film Television and Radio School

Camera, Set, Action: Process Innovation for Film and TV Production

Film and TV productions, a key area in production screen business, comprise of processes with high demand for creativity and flexibility. However, despite the era of fast developing technology, film production processes are carried out in an old fashioned way. This is reflected, for example, by the fact that document processing accompanied by daily shooting activities is still paper-based and coordinating geographically distributed cast and crew is purely manual. There is an opportunity to bring process innovation into this industry, which can streamline and optimise film production processes and thus reduce production costs. Business Process Management (BPM) is the mainstream contemporary technology-enabled business improvement method. It is proven to provide significant benefits to an organisation in terms of cost savings and responsiveness to changes. In this paper, we apply BPM technology to process innovation for film production. We also share the experience in how to deal with the innovation barriers in the film industry. Over the course of the investigation, a prototype called YAWL4Film was developed on top of a state-of-the-art BPM system. YAWL4Film supports collection and entering of production related data and automatic generation of reports required during film production. The system was deployed in two student productions at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), as well as in a feature film production by Porchlight, an independent film production company