Aoba Pictures shoots commercials and branded documentaries with a crew of 24. Between two storage floors, a van kit, and rotating freelancers, gear management used to be one person's entire job. Here's how they run it on Werp™ today.
Aoba Pictures is a mid-size production company: cinema cameras, a wall of lenses, lighting, audio, grip — roughly 700 items once you count every cable and V-mount battery. Shoots overlap, kits leave the building weekly, and freelance crew join for days at a time.
Before Werp™, the inventory lived in a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, and the equipment manager's memory. It worked — until two shoots landed on the same weekend.
Growth exposed the cracks: bookings clashed, prep lists were rebuilt from scratch for every shoot, and nobody could say which gear was company-owned and which belonged to individual crew members.
The old spreadsheet went in through CSV import, and WerpAI™ filled in models, specs, and images. Accessories were scanned in by barcode. What was budgeted as a week of data entry took one afternoon.
Producers book gear per shoot, with the project name and purpose on every booking and a takeout flag for location days. Conflicts now surface at planning time — weeks out, not on the morning of the call. Return reminders chase late gear automatically.
Every case and body carries a QR label. Crew check gear out with their phones, and a tablet in kiosk mode by the gear-room door handles walk-ups. Every movement lands in the activity history without anyone typing a word.
Bookings sync both ways with Google Calendar, so the production calendar shows which kit is out on which job — no separate tool to check.
Each quarter the team scans through storage in stocktake mode and gets a discrepancy report. The first run surfaced 12 items that had been quietly 'missing' for months. On the Pro plan, the full activity trail answers 'who had it last?' in one click.
Plenty of gear at Aoba belongs to individuals: a DP's vintage prime set, an editor's SSDs, a personal drone. Werp™ lets each item's owner be set to a specific user, not just the workspace — so personal gear lives in the same searchable, bookable inventory while ownership stays unambiguous. When a freelancer wraps, filtering by owner shows exactly what walks out the door with them.
Figures are illustrative, part of the fictional scenario above.
"The gear room used to live in my head. Now it lives in Werp™ — and I get my evenings back."— M. Sato — Equipment Manager, Aoba Pictures
A six-person video team started on the Free plan, recovered ¥400K of 'lost' gear at its first stocktake, and let the plan grow with the team.
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