Case Study: How the Conor Moore Show Uses Scripto to Save 8 Hours a Week

About The Show

The Conor Moore Show is a comedic take on the world of pro golf, featuring Moore’s impersonations, monologues, sketches, as well as interviews. It's an original series on GolfPass, the Golf Channel's subscription service.

How It Started

Being an Executive Producer is tough. Being an Executive Producer while working remotely is even tougher. In February 2020, Andrew Wantuck was hired to run a new show for GolfPass. Then COVID brought television production to a virtual standstill and in-person writers rooms were shuttered.

Andrew and his staff were working remotely as they tried to figure out the right format for their new show, and they were losing hours to logistical headaches. Did you send the file? Email or Slack? What's the latest version called? Did you make the changes we talked about this morning? Has Conor seen them?

Andrew recalls that in the early days of the show, "we had one writer using Microsoft Word, another using Google Docs, and another writer using Final Draft. All of these people were in their own islands working in their own way. It was a mess." By his estimation, they were losing about one day out of a week to communication and workflow inefficiencies.

How It's Going

Andrew was familiar with an older version of Scripto from a previous job. He got in touch and was up and running on a free trial workspace within a day of the demo.

"Scripto came in and saved the day for me."

What Andrew loves most about Scripto is how it puts the entire team on the same page — literally. "The number one thing I love is having a real-time, living, breathing document. And what it does much better than Google Docs is that the document formats like a script."

For studio segments, Scripto's studio format lets his team write to the multimedia elements that are essential to Conor's jokes – specifying the timing of over-the-shoulder graphics, the duration of full-frame video clips, and so on. For sketches and pre-tapes, the screenplay format gives them the flexibility to push the format of their show in new artistic directions. "The fact that Scripto offers a Studio format and a Screenplay format is incredibly helpful for the show that I'm running."

"It saves me and the show an incredible amount of time and it's just so much more efficient."

The ability for everyone to work together in a document while discussing the changes they want to make has become a huge time saver and "cut through the red tape." Before, writing was happening outside of their meetings, so feedback took place in bloated email threads and extra follow-up meetings. Now, it all happens instantly, and the time formerly spent on emails and extra meetings can be spent on more creative work.

"To have the ability at all times say stuff like 'you know I don't like that word', or 'can we move this chunk up here' and all of us can fix that script together in real-time instead of saying 'oh, I'll fix that in an hour and email it to you'... it saves an incredible amount of time and its just so much more efficient. When we leave the meeting, the work is over. We don't need to have a horrible game of phone tag afterwards."

Andrew also loves how Scripto's shared workspace makes it easy to find what he's looking for. "The fact that Scripto is also a Dropbox where all these scripts live and I know where everything's at is incredibly helpful." Scripto essentially centralized everything into one easy-to-use platform, dispensing with hours of endless back-and-forth.

"We shoot in Dublin, we do post in Orlando, a lot of the writers are based in LA. All of us in real time use Scripto. I couldn't see any other way to do the show."

Time is Money

Scripto didn't just help The Conor Moore Show become more efficient, it made the show better, and then became a launching pad for a second show.

Once Andrew and his team found their rhythm and got really good at writing and producing the studio segments, the Golf Channel asked if they could start writing sketches as well. Their budget increased and they started producing sketches and cold opens. Andrew noted that he has "a talented team of writers driving creative. So the infrastructure that Scripto provided enabled us to grow as a show."

The Golf Channel liked one of the actors they had in a sketch and decided to give that person their own show. With The Conor Moore Show dialed in, Andrew has enough time in his day to run this second show as well. "I'm able to run a whole other show for the network. I don't think that would be possible if Scripto wasn't being used."

"I can't say enough how Scripto made my life as a showrunner better. We're a small nimble crew all over the globe. It could not be done without this."