TimeTrain: Entertainment Agency CRM with AI Casting, PPTX Export & 12 Live Industry Intelligence Scrapers

Entertainment agencies track hundreds of contacts across studios, production companies, and networks — each with individual phone call histories, email campaign status, pitching stage, and mandate notes. Manually managing submission pipelines across 14 status stages for multiple active projects while monitoring open assignments was operationally unsustainable. Agencies also needed a structured casting workflow: analysing a script, defining role requirements, identifying appropriate talent with comparable project proofs, and exporting everything as a branded presentation for studio meetings — a process that took days to assemble manually from scattered research.

We built TimeTrain as a Django-Templates-rendered CRM with four apps: mainapp (contact, client, project, email, grid, meeting), authapp (session auth with OTP password reset), landing (public website + Printful merchandise), and interactive (portfolio pages). The contact and company management system supports multiple email addresses per contact, a 5-stage phone sheet workflow, email campaign scheduling (EmailSchedule with contact+tag+position filters and next_send_date automation), and a ProjectSubmission model with 14 status choices — Active/Archived. Meeting participants are saved as MeetingContact snapshots (first_name, last_name, company, position captured at meeting time), preserving historical accuracy regardless of future contact record changes. The AI Casting System (Phase 2) uses GPT-4o-mini's structured JSON output to generate casting requirements from a project brief, then GPT generates TalentSuggestion records per role — each with name, justification, comparable_project_name, comparable_project_success_metric, and social_media_links JSON. The PPTX builder uses python-pptx to assemble branded presentations: AI generates inspirational quotes, project descriptions, role briefs, talent bios, and comparable titles per slide; a custom 3D background is applied to every slide via set_slide_background_image. RocketReach API integration enables contact research by name, employer, and title — finding professional email and phone from the CRM. 12 industry scrapers auto-populate the intelligence dashboard: Playwright for IMDB, requests+BeautifulSoup for Deadline (3 pages per section — TV, Film, Box Office) and other publications.

Django + Django Templates + PostgreSQL. Celery for async tasks. OpenAI GPT-4o (casting suggestions, PPTX slide content) and GPT-4o-mini (role generation). python-pptx for branded PowerPoint generation. RocketReach API for contact lookup. Printful API for merchandise. Playwright headless for IMDB scraping. BeautifulSoup + requests for news scrapers. django-ckeditor for rich-text email bodies. Session auth with 6-digit OTP password reset.