Streamlining Talent Approvals: Best Practices and Tips
By The ImageApprovals Team ·
Navigating the talent approvals process in film and TV production can be time-consuming. Ensuring that all actors are satisfied with their representation — whilst adhering to contractual obligations — requires detailed planning and organisation. These nine best practices will help your production benefit from improved workflows, quicker and more secure cast approvals, and a more positive experience for talent, their reps, and your publicity and producing teams.
1. Photography Direction on Set
Before the talent approvals process begins, it is worth considering how you would like your photographers to approach their shots on set in advance. Most established photographers already know what shots you need and what you do not, but if you are working with upcoming photographers or those with less experience specifically within unit stills work, it is worthwhile ensuring they know what coverage you are looking for — so that you end up with the assets you need and not an excess of unusable crew photos.
2. Plan for Approvals During Pre-Production
It is important to be in touch with your talent approvals team well in advance (if possible) so they can plan their schedule accordingly and do their best to accommodate your timelines — ensuring nothing holds you up from getting approval for vital first-look images.
By contacting your image approvals team ahead of your photographer’s first day, you can also reduce the costs of the approvals process. They will be able to advise the photographer on effective image delivery to make image handling more streamlined and affordable for the production.
3. Image Delivery
Photographers should be aware of any image delivery specifications that you or your talent approvals team require. RAW files should be sent either in their native camera RAW format (with any sidecar .XMP files included), or as DNG or TIF files. These formats ensure that any edits can be seen in the image preview whilst also enabling retouchers to revert to the original RAW settings if needed.
If your photographer has graded their images, they should deliver these as high-resolution JPGs in addition to the RAW files. To ensure the integrity of the approvals process, it is extremely important that file names match their RAW counterparts exactly — with only the file extension differing (e.g. .JPG or .ARW).
Consistent file naming and folder structures are essential to streamlining the approvals process. They make images and files easily accessible and identifiable for everyone working with them. Renaming files to follow a set protocol and clearly sorting folders reduces confusion, saves time, and keeps the production on schedule.
You can find detailed guidance in our photography delivery specs to see what your photographers should prepare before delivering stills.
4. Backing Up and Security
For security, there should always be more than one copy of your stills at any time. We strongly advise that your photographer retain a copy of the stills and that any images sent to an approvals team are a duplicate copy. To reduce risk to your assets whilst in transit, we can provide your photographer with an encrypted hard drive to copy their stills onto.
Backing up files is crucial because you cannot always prevent unexpected technical failures, data corruption, or accidental deletion. Regular backups protect you against data loss and provide peace of mind that your files are always available when needed.
When working with production stills, ImageApprovals maintains several robust back-up processes to ensure the security and integrity of your assets at all times. We follow strict timelines and purge processes so that we only hold your data for as long as is necessary.
5. Establish Cast Approval Rights
Before handing over the project to your talent approvals team, it is helpful to have each cast member’s approval rights outlined in their contracts. Having these details to hand speeds up the tagging process and gets images ready for reviewing as soon as possible. Be sure to provide your approvals team with the names of all cast members with stills approval rights before images are shared — so that group and solo images are categorised correctly and kill limits are calculated accurately.
The ImageApprovals platform can detect the difference between solo and group images and enables you to input the talent’s contracted approval percentages, so that they cannot kill more images than their terms allow — guaranteeing all cast meet their contract requirements.
6. Do Not Create Actor Folders
Historically, managing cast approvals manually via contact sheets or applications like Dropbox required spending hours organising stills into actor folders. With a dedicated image approval platform, this is no longer necessary. Your approvals team will tag actors into the images in which they appear, and the stills approvals platform will automatically show each actor only the images they feature in.
This also means avoiding large numbers of duplicate files when it comes to group shots.
7. Budget for the Talent Approvals Process
Talent approvals are often overlooked until post-production, at which point there may be no budget left for a stills approvals portal or management service — forcing productions to spend days managing approvals manually with messy and insecure methods.
Get in touch with ImageApprovals before your first day of shooting. We will provide you with a fixed quote for your project as well as advice on how to reduce costs if you are working within a specific budget.
8. Establish Your Tagging Preferences
Having a clear idea of how you want images to be tagged is highly beneficial for the approvals process. It gives you the ability to choose between optimising for actor and rep experience or maximising legal protection for the production, depending on the needs and priorities of your project.
Your talent will only see images in which they have been tagged, so inform your talent approvals team of your preferences before the stills go through cast approvals. The two main approaches are:
- Broad tagging — tagging actors in every image in which they appear, even if just the back of their head, they are significantly out of focus, or only partially visible.
- Face-visible tagging — tagging actors only in images where their face is clearly enough visible to be easily identified.
We recommend collaborating with your talent and their reps to establish their preferences so that all parties have a great experience and save time by seeing only the images they need to.
9. Use a Digital Platform for Approvals
Utilising a digital platform for talent approvals allows for easy reviewing and tracking throughout the process. Opt for specialised software designed to make it as straightforward as possible for actors to make their kills and for stakeholders to mark selects. The ability to export PDF contact sheets and spreadsheet reports is also useful for providing a transparent approval trail and keeping the process moving smoothly.
To see how productions have put these practices into action, read our case studies, or reach out to our team if you would like to get a quote or request a demo of the ImageApprovals platform.