When I worked at Mikros Image as a render wrangler on the film Asterix, The Land of Gods (see my work on the project here), I needed to communicate with the production team to know whate were the priority shots for the next day. At the beginnning, we used to use Google Sheets to exchange that information. That was not very convenient for both them and me. So I proposed the idea of a web-app that will let them prioritize the shots they want to be rendered first and which the render wrangler will send to the real farm. miFirst was born. Because the app needed to be developed quickly I chose a language I know very well : PHP.  Then I added new features like the possibility to generate reports of calculated /rendering jobs and send them by email, possibility to have multiple prio on the same job (prod, sup, artist,…),…

The film done, the app was shelved the other productions of Mikros (mainly commercials and live films). But now, because of the success of Asterix, Mikros has developped a new entity, Mikros Image Animation, that asked me to update miFirst for the new pipe, including a new job dispatching service. During these few years, I really improved my level in Python, which became my new favorite language. I decided to rebuild miFirst with that language for some reasons. The first one was because the PHP version was not fully stable because how quickly I had to develop it. The second one was because Python is used a lot in VFX industry. The last reason because, well I wanted to practice that language. The problem was that redeveloping miFirst in Python will make me lose the benefits of a web-app. And that was the moment Django made its entrance. These Python framework let developpers to make their apps for the web ! Perfect.

This new version has not report management yet but all other features had been optimized (like job list display, filter and search management).

NB: All the images here are part of the Django version.

Company: Mikros Image / Mikros Image Animation
Languages/Technology used: Python, Django, MySQL, JavaScript/jQuery, HTML/CSS, PHP (for the previous version)