One source of truth for every film and TV project , submission to delivery
A multiplatform media and entertainment company tracks film and television projects from agent submission through development, pitching, sales, production, and delivery in Airtable. Stage-specific fields, timestamped status changes, and automated stall alerts give Development and Production teams a single source of truth across more than 40 active projects, replacing scattered emails, Google Docs, and Excel files.
The problem
Development and Production teams tracked film and TV projects across emails, Google Docs, and Excel files with no shared structure. Low adoption and manual data entry meant the records that existed were often incomplete or out of date by the time anyone needed them.
Nobody had visibility into how long a project had sat in a given stage or where bottlenecks were forming. Stalled projects went unnoticed until a deadline was already at risk, and there was no built-in accountability for the leaders who owned each stage.
What they built
The company built a single Airtable system that follows a project from agent submission through development, pitching, sales, production, and delivery. Each stage carries its own unique fields so the record captures what actually matters at that point in the lifecycle, and every status change is timestamped automatically.
Automated reminders fire when a project stalls in a stage, notifying leaders through Slack instead of relying on someone to notice. Projects link out to the buyers and law firms involved, so Development, Production, Sales, Legal, and Finance all work from the same underlying records.
The outcome
Development and Production teams now have a single source of truth spanning more than 40 active projects instead of a patchwork of inboxes and spreadsheets. Dashboards showing time-in-stage make reviews faster and give creative executives a clear view of where projects sit.
Automated stall alerts route accountability to the leaders who own each stage, and less manual re-entry across systems means the underlying data is more likely to be current when it is reviewed.
Inside the solution
Film and TV Project Lifecycle Tracking
Project & Portfolio Management
- Submission intake and triage
- Development stage progression with unique fields per stage
- Sales and pitching pipeline
- Production and delivery tracking
- Automated stage-change timestamps and stall alerts
- Information scattered across emails, Google Docs, and Excel
- Low adoption and data integrity from manual entry
- No visibility into time-in-stage or bottlenecks
- Lack of accountability for stalled projects
- Organization-wide project visibility across the lifecycle
- Faster reviews via dashboards showing time-in-stage
- Accountability through automated alerts to leaders
- Reduced manual effort via automations
- Development
- Production
- Sales
- Legal
- Finance
- Creative
- Executives
- Coordinators
- Slack
Film & TV project lifecycle tracking
Track every film and television project on one record from agent submission through development, pitching, sales, production, and delivery, with stage-specific fields, a timestamped stage-change log, and dashboards that show exactly how long each project has sat where it is. Automations open the project record the moment a submission is advanced, log every stage move, and alert the leader who owns a stalled stage, while native Airtable AI fields draft submission coverage, stage-review recaps, and buyer-feedback digests.
From scattered files to one project lifecycle system
Copy the templates
Add stage-specific fields
Automate timestamps and alerts
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Each project is a record that carries stage-specific fields, so submission details, development notes, sales terms, and production dates all live on the same record without crowding each other. The project's current stage determines which fields are relevant.
A single Airtable base with automated stage-change timestamps. Status updates that used to live in an inbox or a shared doc now update a field on the project record automatically, so the data is in one place by default.
When a project sits in a stage past an expected window, an automation notifies the responsible leader through Slack. That closes the gap between a project quietly stalling and someone noticing during a review.
Projects link to buyer and law firm records, so Sales, Legal, and Finance can see the same relationships Development and Production are tracking, without duplicating that information in a separate list.
Not yet for the lifecycle tracking itself. The company is evaluating AI-driven intake that would read unstructured agent submission emails and populate project fields automatically, building on the same structured records this workflow already produces.