Case study: Miss Scarlet and the Duke

“I have to say I don’t know what we would have done without you! Your attention to detail and organizational skills helped to streamline the approvals process greatly and certainly made it much less painful for us and our cast!”

— Patty Ishimoto, Producer · 5-star Google review

Twenty thousand images, and no way to tell which episode any of them came from

Season three arrived as a hard drive holding more than 20,000 stills from 31 shoot days and multiple photographers, full of duplicates and filenames that told you nothing.

For a returning drama that is the expensive kind of mess. Episodic television needs stills sorted by episode, because that is how post-production, publicity and the distributor all ask for them. Nothing in the delivery said which episode anything belonged to. And underneath the sorting problem sat a contractual one: get approvals wrong on a set that size and you risk breaching an actor’s agreement without ever noticing.

Call sheets turned out to be the index

The information nobody had was already written down, just not in the images. Production call sheets record who was on set and what was being shot on any given day, so we took a working duplicate of the drive and used the call sheets to map every shoot day to its episode.

From there it was mechanical rather than guesswork:

• Images organised into episode folders.
• Every file renamed to carry unique, descriptive information, so post-production and distributors could find a specific frame without opening twenty of them.
• Curation down to roughly 6,000 images for review. The production chose a mid-level edit: duplicates, blinks, false expressions and technically poor frames removed, range and choice preserved.
• Accounts for each cast member, with Welcome Packs of credentials and a short guide for production to forward on, so the production office answered no support calls.
• A producer’s account, so she could watch progress without chasing actors or their representatives.

Twenty days, inside one February

• 8th February: Original images received
• 14th February: All images organised and online, ready for cast to approve
• 28th February: All cast had completed their approvals

Six days to turn a disordered drive into an episode-sorted, curated, cast-ready set. Fourteen more for the cast to clear it.

The drive went back with everything sorted into Killed, Approved and Approved Selects, plus download links for the approved images grouped by episode, ready to hand straight to whoever needed them.

Four seasons of the same discipline

We have worked with the team on three further seasons since. Alongside the audits, episode structuring and cast tagging, that ongoing work has grown to include two services this story hasn’t touched yet: batch editing to lift low-light scenes, and captioning with embedded metadata, so every frame carries its own description and credit.

Metric	Total
Images handled	Over 41,000
Stills curated out	Over 28,000
Cast approval rate	At least 80%
Coverage	More than 86 days

Look at the first two rows together. More than two thirds of everything shot was removed before a single actor was asked to look at it. That discipline is what keeps an approval rate above 80% across four seasons.

If your delivery lands as a pile of shoot days

Episodic stills that arrive unsorted stay unsorted, because nobody downstream has the time or the call sheets to fix it, and the cost turns up later as a distributor query or a frame nobody can locate.

If that sounds like your delivery, send it to us and we’ll do the sorting, or read how our episoding service works.