Case study: Audrey's Children

“Aimee and her team at Image Approvals are truly fantastic. They made the process seamless from start to finish. They were incredibly communicative throughout, and ensured everything was delivered at the completion of the project in an organized fashion as promised. I will absolutely be working with them again in the future! Highly recommend.”

— Julia Fisher Farbman, Emblem Entertainment

Six actors, a director and a post-production team

Audrey’s Children is a feature film from Emblem Entertainment. Sixteen days of unit stills and a full gallery shoot produced roughly 2,000 images, and six cast members held approval rights over the frames they appeared in.

Six approvers is the number that looks difficult. It wasn’t the difficult part. The complication was that three groups needed to do three different things with the same set at the same time. Cast had to approve their own frames and see nobody else’s. The director needed to pull shots that didn’t fit the film, on creative grounds rather than contractual ones. Post-production needed to watch the whole thing progress without touching any of it.

Give everyone the same access and the set stops being trustworthy. Give them separate copies and nobody can say which version is current.

The audit came first, and it found gaps

Before a single image went out for review, we audited the full set across every submission. The counts didn’t reconcile, which meant nobody could yet say with confidence that everything shot had actually arrived.

We traced the discrepancies, identified what was missing and confirmed the final set was complete before anyone started work on it. It’s unglamorous, and it’s the reason no gap surfaced two months later, with the shoot long finished and no way left to fix it. Every delivery that reaches our photo lab gets the same treatment.

Everyone saw the version of the set they needed

One set of images, four kinds of access:

• Six cast accounts, each showing an actor only the frames they appear in, with their contractual limits enforced by the platform rather than checked by hand.
• A director’s account, so she could review the full set and exclude shots on creative grounds, separately from anything the cast decided.
• Read-only access for post-production, so they could follow progress live without interrupting the cast or altering anything.
• A single organised set underneath all of it, tagged and structured so the team could find any frame without asking us for it.

Where the two months went

Date	Milestone
March 29th	Images received and audited
April 4th	Images uploaded and released to cast for review
May 28th	All cast approvals complete
May 31st	All images organised and delivered to the client, with a full set of reports

Worth being straight about the shape of that timeline. From receiving the files to putting them in front of the cast took five working days. From the final approval to organised delivery with full reports took four. The eight weeks in between belonged to six actors and their representatives, and no platform can make working actors review faster.

What a production can control is the two ends, and whether the middle needs chasing. Emblem could see exactly who had finished and who hadn’t, the whole time, without asking anyone. When the last approval came in, 82% of the set had been cleared, which left a broad, genuinely usable range rather than a thin one.

If more than the cast need a say

Most stills approvals are described as though only actors are involved. In practice a director wants a creative veto, post-production wants visibility, and a producer wants neither of those conversations landing in their inbox.

That’s a permissions problem before it’s an approvals problem. If your production has several groups who each need a different view of the same set, see how the platform handles it or tell us about the shoot and we’ll scope it.