philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Artella is a Cloud-Based Tool That Aims to Be the GitHub of Creative VR Collaboration

Finding like-minded creatives for any type of project can be a challenge.

But Artella, a new cloud-based production platform, is aiming to make finding teams, and creating animation, graphics, and VR projects just a little bit easier.

Created by Bobby Beck, Carlos Baena, and Shawn Kelly, animators from Pixar, Paramount, and ILM who have worked on a few films you may have heard of, such as Rango, Transformers, and Toy Story 2, Artella is a platform for creatives to make project pitches, find other people who are interested in working on that project, and then manage everything within one digital studio. Since it’s a cloud-based platform, everything works even if the team members are physically split up across the globe.

Artella gives creators the ability to bring people together by first helping artists connect to projects, and then helping creators on manage those projects, tasks, workflows, databases, and files.

The file management part of Artella is the core of the system. To start, a manager chooses a project type to configure the pipeline for that specific project’s needs. For example, a VR project would have a different file structure than a game project.

...the best stuff you get is not necessarily the stuff you have in your head.” Beck said. Instead, Beck feels the best ideas come from people working around you and he thinks that Artella breaks down these barriers for communication and collaboration very quickly.

Payment and contracts happen between the project managers and the contributors directly, with Artella not handling –or taking a cut — of the transactional side of business. It also doesn’t take any ownership in the IP or any equity in the project, with those rights staying with the creators. It’s currently free to try, and plans to stay free to join, but will eventually roll out monthly fees per user per projects billed to the creator, with different tiers ($10-$30/user) based on different creator’s needs.

Currently, Artella’s focus is on animation, VR, video games, film, and commercials, with plans to expand into other areas as the community helps shape what they want out of the product.

And with Artella projects now moving forward — Beck mentioned one company called High Fidelity that ran a hackathon on Artella at the Upload Collective to create 27 characters in three days

See the full story here: http://uploadvr.com/artella-cloud-based-collaboration-tool-aims-github-creative-vr-project-management/