LAIKA's Next Generation Stage Planning System

LAIKA launched the Digital Big Boards (DBB) Web Planner project to scale up production and increase accuracy in the stage shooting schedule. This is the first major update since 2017, when LAIKA launched the DBB Planner, a native application built for custom tabletop touch displays that replaced the traditional analog method of pinning task cards onto physical boards. The DBB suite schedules the stage production timeline and renders live updates, a breakthrough that converted the shooting schedule into accessible and up-to-date information for the whole studio. Its success spawned spin-off applications for stage support crew and asset fabricators to manage their daily schedules. However, after adoption, we found scalability and usability issues with the tabletop DBB Planner. Difficulty making real-time updates via the touchscreen app, along with interdependent apps requiring increased accuracy in daily scheduling led to the development of its successor: the Web Planner. This new web application improves real-time performance and scales to support larger concurrent productions.