Case study: Firebrand

“We worked with Image Approvals on a feature film shot in spring 2022. Their team have been wonderful to work with throughout the entire process – they have been totally available to help with any queries or problems we’ve had, and has been on-hand to help with any technical troubleshooting. The platform itself is easy to navigate and has provided everything we’ve needed, including ease of access/use for high profile talent and their teams. After our good experience with Image Approvals in 2022 we are working with them again on another feature film, and would strongly recommend Image Approvals as a reasonably priced, great service for image clearance.”

— Emily Lowe, Producer, Brouhaha Entertainment · 5-star Google review

The approvals ran for ten months

Firebrand shot across 29 days in spring 2022 and produced over 11,000 stills, with three A-list cast holding approval rights, each represented by a team.

The images went online on 29 July 2022. The last approval came in on 1 June 2023.

That is not a delay, and it is not a failure of anyone’s process. It is what happens when three in-demand actors and their representatives have to find time for a careful review between other jobs. The question a production actually faces is not how to speed that up. It is what has to stay standing for ten months while it happens.

What ten months of hosting has to survive

Metric	Outcome
Shoot days covered	29
Images received and catalogued	11,000+
Curated working set uploaded	~5,000
Cast-approved images	~2,500
Time from final approval to delivery	Same working day

Over that period the set had to stay secure, stay online, and stay exactly as each actor left it, with every partial review preserved. Brouhaha needed to see who had finished and who hadn’t at any point across the year, without emailing three agents to ask.

We tracked all 11,000 files from camera to delivery using both manual and automated checks, so nothing went missing across ten months of a live project. Cast, representatives and production staff had round-the-clock access to the help portal throughout, which matters more than it sounds when someone picks the review back up after eight weeks away.

Curation is what made a ten-month review survivable

Eleven thousand images would have made this worse. We hand-curated down to just under 5,000, drawing on decades of photographic experience in the industry, keeping the coverage the production needed without handing three busy actors an impossible task.

Nearly 2,500 images came back approved: a substantial cleared set for press, marketing and distribution.

Then delivery took a day

Date	Milestone
30th June 2022	Original images received
29th July 2022	All images tagged and uploaded to the platform
1st June 2023	All cast approvals complete
1st June 2023	Fully organised images delivered to the client

The last approval and the final organised delivery share a date. After ten months of waiting, nobody had to wait another week for the packaging, because the organisation had been done at the start rather than left until the end.

Brouhaha have since come back to us for a second feature.

If your cast are going to take their time

Long approval windows are normal on films with well-known cast, and they are not a problem to solve so much as a condition to plan for. What you need is a set that stays put, progress you can see without asking, and a delivery that is ready the moment the last decision is made.

If that is your production, talk to us about the timeline or see how the platform handles long reviews.