The story

From start-up to scale.

Crew Me Up started years ago, when two guys from the film + tv production industry—a UPM and a stuntman—joined up to create a better way for department managers to hire well-trained, seasoned crew for their productions.

They had identified a pain-point in their business that they could solve with a simple solution. Together, they built the first version of Crew Me Up, enabling managers and crew to post and search job listings.

Technology moves at a rapid pace, however. And only a few short years later, they needed to not only refresh their experience, but to build upon it and evolve their solution to meet the needs of their changing industry landscape.

That meant thinking about the production process as a whole, how people are managed as part of that process and where the opportunities were to elevate that experience.

Evolution

From there, we realized the massive opportunity to shift the paradigm.

During conversations with the CMU team, we set our sights on expanding the capabilities of the app to support, not just job listings, but negotiations and hiring, resource allocation and unit assignments, call sheets, vendors, shooting locations, and episodic productions.

Community + sharing

From behind-the-scenes photos and video to clips of upcoming projects, we created a space for Crewbies to connect and grow.

Unified production scheduling

Stay informed across your entire department. Know which Crewbies are on set, which unit they're working in and what location they're at for the day.

Connect with crewbies

Expand your market across the nation to pull the highest expertise onto your crew, create crew groups, send team messages and stay connected.

A network of preferred vendors

Search Crew Me Up's large network of national industry vendors for all of your production needs. Find equipment and services without leaving the app.

Manage your production

Manage people and positions, units, departments, locations, vendors, daily assignments, pay rates and union scales, time-off and more.

Union + diversity hiring

Crew Me Up built strong relationships with industry labor unions and diversity organizations to ensure a fair and equitable community for all professionals.

Community + sharing

Creating a space for the insiders.

The home screen evolved into a social feed where users can find exciting stories and content to stay up-to-date on their colleagues' work.

Find stories and posts from friends and crewmates from across the country. At the top, get a quick glance at the latest job listings that match your skill set.

Share text, photos and video with your network of Crewbies. Add background colors, attach multiple photos and mention other users in posts.

Support for multiple user accounts and account types makes posting as a Crewbie, organization or vendor simple and convenient. Change on the fly.

Comment on posts from the Crewbies that follow you, or that you follow back. Share inspiration and get kudos from others in the industry.

Sprinkled into the social feed are vendor ads targeted at Crewbies in active projects. Based on project locations, Crew Me Up matches the right resources to your projects to keep your production running.

Connect with Crewbies

Build your network of trusted resources.

The Connections tabs of the app got a robust update, taking it from a list of profiles, to a digital rolodex of crew, teams and industry organizations to build relationships with.

We designed flows to give users the ability to create connetions, group Crewbies together into teams, send direct and group messages.

Connections is also where users find the opporunity to discover, follow and join industry and special interest groups.

Manage your production

Jobs, departments, units, projects + episodes.

We pushed beyond the basic listing, to include direct offers and public listings. Then further, to enable two-way negotiations of pay scales, kit and expense fees, and travel stipends. And that's all before you get the job.

Check out how we continued the journey through the production and after.

Studios use a mix of tech platforms to manage tv and film production resources and recruit, negotiate, hire, assign, manage and debrief crew.

Crew Me Up is the first universal solution for production management professionals that brings everything together into a unified app.

Unified production scheduling

Manage your schedule, manage your crew.

See which days your scheduled to be on set or location, check who you're reporting to—or who's reporting to you—get the daily call sheet and schedule time off, all from one place. Work has never been easier.

Project and department managers can create schedules, assign and move crew to different units, schedule time-off and release additional labor on lighter days.
‍
Crewbies can search and find working days, see your hiring manager and who you report to on set or run through the daily call sheet for the full breakdown of all production activity.

A network of preferred vendors

Everything you need, anywhere you need it.

Discover and connect with equipment and service vendors around the country to support your regional or on-location productions.

Add approved vendors to projects for all department managers to access and save favorite vendors for use across projects.

The outcome

Here's what we delivered in the end.

With our focus on UX and introducing new features, we measured success in terms of capabilities that passed user acceptance testing and was delivered to development.

253

Beautiful new app screens designed.

27

Intuitive new user flows reimagined.

38

Powerful new user features added.

Ideas

Forward thinking.

Interviews, tips, guides, industry best practices, and news.

View all posts

Development

6 min read

Navigating the CMS: Comparing WordPress and Webflow

The choice of CMS can profoundly impact a company's ability to create, manage, and scale their web content; it stands as a linchpin for effective online strategies.

Read article