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« on: Jan 16, 2014, 10:48 am »
I have many thoughts on this subject, both as a stage manager and as a teacher of young stage managers.
Teaching thoughts first:
I teach at a school where students work alongside a variety of professional stage managers. Inevitably, after they do a show as a PA observing a new SM I will see them use or mimic a piece of paperwork that they encounter when they next work a school show. Sometimes that means just a minor tweak to layout, wording or format and my response is 'Great, this is what's supposed to happen, we see something we like, we adapt it to suit our style and our needs.' Sometimes it's a major change and I have a conversation with a student about why they are using a form that is totally inappropriate for what they are doing, it overly complicates or overly simplifies what they need for a show. Primarily this involved daily calls or reports. There is one daily call form in particular my students try to use without really understanding when it is useful and when it isn't.
Personal thoughts about my own paperwork:
I'm generally happy if my format works for someone else and they take it and adapt it after working with me. My paperwork is a result of working with many different people and different theaters. When it comes to layout and design choices that are clearly recognizable, I start to hesitate. I worked with someone years ago and liked their header so I asked if I could use it on my next show. They said yes, they showed me how they made it so I could recreate it as I liked. I used that for years, then switched to something else. I was sitting in a meeting and from across the table saw a props list for a show I wasn't involved with that had the same header I had used, but all of the alignment had been screwed up and it just looked...messy, unintentional, lazy. And I was not happy. I don't like it when my work is borrowed poorly. Use it, but understand why I made the choices I did and how things are supposed to relate to each other. And, like Matthew, there are personal workflow reminders and lists that I try to avoid leaving on servers for other people to access because they are so specific to how I sort through information and work with a team.
To go back to part of the original question, the theater owns the work I create for their show, which I interoperate as the way I present the accumulated information. I leave pdf documents and hard copies when I go. If a theater remounts a show the next SM can have my paperwork as a resource and a starting point but will likely need to adapt to a new surrounding anyway, they possibly have their own formats that work best for their crew. Sometimes, if the show has a set future the SM will ask nicely if I wouldn't mind sending along editable things and most of the time I do - when approached by a fellow SM I'm generally happy to help but ask that if they change things at all they take my name off of it. But I've also been involved in and witness to some vicious fights with Production Managers about them wanting SMs to leave only editable documents on company servers. Sometimes I hold my ground and don't, sometimes I'm too tired and it isn't worth the fight.