What productivity Apps do we use at Sunday Treat? Since launching in 2021, we’ve moved through a whole suite of apps, services and widgets to help us deliver our work.
These range from the most common and obvious creative solutions that are used across the industry, to some more innovative up-and-coming ideas we’re really excited about.
Take a look at our top picks of what the Sunday Treat team love.
The most obvious place to start this list is with Adobe Creative Cloud, the primary suite of tools we use in our creative work. It’s difficult to work within the creative industries and not know what Creative Cloud is, but for the uninitiated, it’s a suite of creativity and productivity apps that range across all things video, image, graphics, digital media, web and so much more.
We mainly use Premiere Pro as our primary NLE but regularly take advantage of Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects and Illustrator. We even use Acrobat to send PDF versions of release forms to contributors and locations mangers.
Side features we love are the ability to easily save all your edit files to the cloud, meaning the post-production department can transfer Premiere project files between them seamlessly.
Whilst Adobe CC handles all things creation, Google Suite is our powerhouse for admin and organisation. From Gmail and Drive to Meet and Calendar, we rely on this daily to organise and schedule shoots, projects in developments and company admin.
Google Calendar allows the team to keep up to date with each other's movements, allowing for us all to book in meetings and shoots around everyone's availability without having to check directly with them first.
Google Drive is our online storage service, keeping everything from company assets and logos to rough notes from meetings. Google Docs suite of collaboration tools makes working remotely a breeze. It’s common for us to draft up creative in a Google Doc and then work with clients remotely to allow them to change, comment and add notes to the same document, allowing for a more collaborative process.
Email is great - but for day to day instant messaging, Slack just beats them all. Slack is a workspace designed instant messaging platform that allows you to communicate with your team members much quicker and much more efficiently. Think of it like WhatsApp but for work.
You can have multiple channels with Slack. We use these on a project by project basis, only inviting people in when it’s time. For example, the creative and client services departments may be working on pitches for a particular project - but we’ll only invite production in once the project has been greenlit. Likewise, we’ll then have post-production join when we’re about to edit. This way, team members don’t get bombarded with messages and notifications for things that just aren’t relevant to them.
We also love the ‘Huddle’ feature exclusive to Slack Pro that allows for instant group chats and screen sharing at the click of a button which is much faster and simpler than making a traditional phone call.
When it comes to video review and delivery, we’ve been on a bit of a journey. Historically we’ve used Vimeo, YouTube and Google Drive to send review links and final files to clients, but we now we solely use Frame.
Frame is a service that is great for uploading and sharing drafts of edits with clients through private, unlisted links. But its real power comes from its feedback system which allows clients and the internal Sunday Treat team to write comments directly on videos at certain timestamps. You can also draw annotations and point things out like if a light stand makes it into shot or mark small areas of a clip that requires graphics work.
Best of all, using the Frame plugin for Premiere, the editors can see this feedback coming in real-time without even having to leave Premiere and check it off as they work their way through for all to see.
Sunday Treat regularly manages a huge range of projects from small video-call based interviews to large crew TVCs - Monday.com is our portal for managing this. It essentially works as a project tracker allowing you to attach certain actions, statuses and people to projects. Using multiple ‘boards’, we track projects from initial development through to pre-production, post-production and then final delivery, using smart statuses as a way of easily defining precisely what needs to be done and at what point.
For example, when we send an edit off to a client, we can mark a project as ‘awaiting feedback.’ Everyone within the team can look at our board, see what that the project is out with a client and know there is nothing to action. Then, when a client does give feedback, our assigned account manager sets a new deadline with the post-production department and the team assigned to that project get automatic notifications telling them what needs to be done and when for; all in a smooth and seamless automated process.
The Sunday Treat team is always putting together treatments, proposals and concepts to help our clients nail down their initial ideas. We do this in a number of ways, but one of the most important is visual imagery so that all sides can be sure they’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.
Kive is a fantastic service that uses AI to store, catalogue and organise our extensive visual library. Many in the team have had individual reference libraries; some were stored in Photos or Lightroom with smart tags, others were literally just folders within folders on their desktop.
We amalgamated all of these together into a Sunday Treat library that automatically categories imagery based on what it finds within the image. For example, need photos of plants? If you search for ‘plant’, Kive will have automatically scanned every image to show you what you are looking for. It makes looking for imagery a million times easier!
We work with our clients to develop creative ideas and offer up new ones during our exploration phase. Whist we’ve tried a range of different options for this such as Google Slides and Canva, Apple Keynote is what we return to time and time again.
Its suite of features make it easy to create new and exciting visuals in a quick and easy way, meaning we can spend more time developing the ideas and less time on having to worry about presentation.
We also love the collaboration tools of iCloud so we can work on decks together in real time.
