Case study: All Creatures Great and Small

“As first time users, the human assistance PBS received from the Image Approvals team to navigate the system, coordinate with talent reps, and bundle assets for review was instrumental for us to achieve our goals (especially in our short timeframe)!”

— Claire Quin, PBS, All Creatures Great and Small

Their first season on the platform

PBS came to us for the fourth season of All Creatures Great and Small with more than 9,000 images, five principal cast holding approval rights, a separate gallery shoot, and a team using our platform for the first time.

That last point shaped the job more than the image count did. This was a team that had run plenty of approvals before, on other tools and by other methods, and the cost of switching systems mid-franchise is exactly what a vendor is supposed to absorb. So we did: someone to say what happens next, to talk to talent representatives who had gone quiet, and to be clear about which of nine thousand frames anybody actually had to make a decision about. Claire Quin’s review picks out the human help ahead of the platform, and that is the honest description of what a first season on a new system needs.

Nine thousand frames are not a series until someone sorts them

Images from nineteen shoot days, several locations and a gallery session don’t arrive organised. They arrive as a pile, and every team downstream then pays for that separately.

We audited the full set first, flagged the RAW files that hadn’t made it across and recovered them, so nothing was quietly missing before anyone relied on it. Then we mapped each shoot day to its episode, so a publicist looking for episode three could find episode three rather than a date. Curation brought the set down to just under 5,000 frames: wide enough to give five actors real choice, tight enough that reviewing it wasn’t a fortnight of someone’s life.

Four days from a delivered drive to cast-ready

Date	Milestone
7th August	Original images received
11th August	All images curated, tagged and online for review
8th September	Cast-approved images organised and delivered

Four working days to take a raw delivery and put a curated, episode-sorted set in front of five actors. The month after that was the cast reviewing around their own schedules, which is how it should be, and PBS could see how far each of them had got without having to ask.

Four seasons in

We have worked with the team on three further seasons since. The pattern has settled: audit every delivery, curate the volume down to something reviewable, structure it by episode and gallery, tag cast accurately at scale, then write captions and apply metadata before it goes anywhere.

Metric	Total
Images handled	Over 13,000
Average approval rate	78%
Stills curated out	Over 6,000
Days of coverage	More than 42

The 6,000 stills curated out matter as much as the 13,000 handled. Those are frames nobody had to open, judge or clear.

If you’re weighing up a switch

Moving an established approvals process onto a new platform feels like a risk in the middle of a franchise, which is why so many teams keep tolerating the tools they have. The switch only works if the vendor carries it: the setup, the talent-rep coordination, and the questions your team shouldn’t have to burn time on.

We do this every week. If your production is at that point, tell us about the shoot and we’ll walk you through what the move actually involves, or see how the platform handles it.