HOW DO YOU KEEP YOUR PROJECT FOLDERS ORGANIZED?

Of course, the work of a motion designer can be hard sometimes (I’m looking at you, rotoscoping). But one part of it not many people anticipate would be so challenging is organizing your projects.
There is no recipe that can magically put all your files in order, but we can share some tips that have been helping us throughout the years.
Let’s tidy up!

1 – BUILD A TEMPLATE FOR YOUR FOLDERS STRUCTURE

It may take a while until you find the folder configuration that works best for you. The ideal structure must cover all the production stages that make sense to most of your projects.
Here at Llama, for an example, we have two main folders: one for pre-production the other for post-production.

Let’s take a look inside the “PRE” folder.

Here is where the work starts.
These are the folders where we keep the raw material we will use later in the project. Moodboards, Storyboards and Concepts go into the “Design” subfolder; the place for Voiceovers, Music and SFX is in “Audio”; and so on.
If you don’t manage audio files in your projects, for an instance, you won’t need the “Audio” folder. Again, it is up to you to assess what your projects require.

Moving on, let us look at the post-production stage.

In this folder we keep all the files we are working on. After Effects projects, Audio Masters and everything concerning to your post-production stage.
When you feel comfortable with your folder structure, recreate it with empty folders which you can duplicate at the beginning of each new project.

2. KEEP A CLIENT IN AND A CLIENT OUT FOLDER

It is really useful to have everything your client send your way always in hand. From briefings to footage and graphic assets, the “CLIENT IN” folder is the right place to store them all.

Likewise, it’s very important to keep track of everything that goes from you to the client, be it the first drafts or the final (final_reallyfinal_V3) masters.

3. NAME YOUR SUBFOLDERS IN THE YYYY-MM-DD FORMAT

This one is as straightforward as it seems. Keep this naming system so all the subfolders will automatically remain in chronological order.

We hope these tips can save you some time and energy in your future projects.
Make sure to check out our work at llama.la