Subtitles of the Movie

Alright in this module we'll look at the use of milestones and milestones can be important things to shoot for, a lot of times we associate milestones with like deadline, we're ready to go or we've met a goal or a deadline by a certain date and that's what we use milestones for. So really the technical definition of a milestone as you're defining a project, it is a task that doesn't necessarily have a given duration, it's something that occurs usually when a series of tasks has been completed before it. So in this case here all of these tasks that I've done, write script, hire keys, hold auditions and so on, storyboard all fall under the category of preproduction and when you're done with preproduction you are ready for camera. So if I go to down here, of course I'll probably ignore, end up putting it further down in our project, select this task name, I'm just doing it with the arrow keys here, I'm going to hit the insert key on keyboard and I'm going to enter in a task called, ready for camera. The duration as I tab over now, all I have to do is zero D, zero day duration, when I press enter that turns it into a milestone and you can see in the Gant chart how that is different in the appearance then all of the other tasks that I have entered in here. So all the other tasks have durations of a week, a couple days, and they're represented by the blue bar. Milestones, by default, unless you change the formatting, of course I'll show you how to change the formatting so you can manipulate the look and feel of your Gant charts, if you take the default formatting, the look and the feel of the Gant chart, milestones are going to be a black diamond as you can see. And you also get the date that appears right beside it. If you hover the mouse pointer over the milestone itself you get the screen tip that tells you exactly what the task is and when that date occurs. Now one other thing that's worth pointing out, if this task is a ready for camera party, as I change the title of it here, and the duration is one day, it turns into a task again that we're more familiar with or at least so far. This can also still be marked as a milestone, so even though most your milestones have a zero day duration they are goals or deadlines as I mentioned. You can take any task that you have and turn it into a milestone. The way you that is you double click on the task name, one of the ways you can do that, but what you're accessing here is the task information dialog box and there's again other ways to open up this dialog box. If you remember the double click you're in pretty good shape here but again we'll kind of deal with this task information, you'll see tons of ways to open this up throughout the course of this tutorial. At any rate what we want to look for is the advanced tab here, and from the advance tab you can see that there's an entry here, a check box that's marked task as milestone, give that a check, click on ok, and what you've just done is you've taken a day long task and you've made it a milestone as you can see right there.