Case study: Belfast

“Thank you and your site for making this process so much easier! The actors found the site very easy to use – as did I!”

— Tamar Thomas, Producer, Belfast

Photographer: Rob Youngson

Five big-name cast, an independent budget

Belfast shot up to 15,000 images across 30 days, with five well-known cast members holding contractual approval rights. It was also an independent production watching every line of its budget.

Those two facts usually pull against each other. Cast with approval rights bring the coordination overhead of a studio picture, while an independent team has neither the staff to absorb it nor the budget to outsource all of it. The usual outcome is that approvals get done badly, late, or by a producer at midnight.

They did the parts they could do cheaply

Belfast took our In-House package, which splits the job rather than handing all of it over. The production kept the labour-intensive work they could do themselves and paid us for the parts that need the platform.

• Their photographer uploaded stills straight to the platform, so there was no handover step and nobody had to ship a drive.
• A member of the production staff tagged which cast appeared in each image, which is time-consuming but needs no specialist tooling.
• We created the cast accounts and sent Welcome Packs through for production to forward on: credentials plus a short guide, so nobody had to answer login questions.
• Tamar Thomas got a producer’s account, so she could watch progress across all five actors without chasing anyone or their representatives.
• When approvals closed, configurable kill reports gave the production a clean list of what was cleared.

That division saved the production over £4,000 against a fully managed approvals service.

Twenty-two days, enquiry to close

Date	Milestone
21st September	Initial enquiry
30th September	All images online on the platform
7th October	All cast completed their approvals
13th October	Approvals process complete, project closed

Twenty-two days from a first email to a closed project, with five actors cleared in the week after the images went live.

If the budget is the constraint

Approvals are not an optional part of a production, but the shape of the service is negotiable. If you have staff time and no budget, In-House gives you the platform and the reporting while you keep the tagging. If you have budget and no time, we take all of it.

Tell us which of those you are, and we’ll price accordingly. Get a no-obligation quote, or see what the platform does.