Case study: Redeeming Love

“We engaged with Image Approvals to help streamline our talent approvals process for one of our larger feature films, Redeeming Love. It was INCREDIBLY easy to use and saved us so much time! We opted to manage everything in-house and the Image Approvals customer support was fantastic. Aimee made sure we had everything we needed to get going, was fast to respond whenever we had any questions and was always flexible to our needs. Image Approvals gave us quick and easy welcome packs that we could forward on to talent reps so they could go through their approvals without needing any support, which was great! We were also able to track the actors’ progress and see when they had completed without having to check-in with reps. All of our actors found the platform extremely easy to use and loved that it saved their progress as they went so they didn’t have to do it all in one go. Image Approvals has seriously made our job so much easier and we will definitely look to work with them again!”

— Laura Beth Winchester, Marketing Specialist, WTA Media · 5-star Google review

Seven actors, seven different contracts

Redeeming Love is an independent feature starring Abigail Cowen, Famke Janssen and Nina Dobrev. Thirty days of stills photography produced several thousand images, and seven actors held approval rights over them.

Seven sets of rights, and no two written the same way. Some contracts split the requirement between solo and group images, setting a different minimum for each. Others applied a flat 50% across everything. Every one of those percentages is measured against that actor’s own pool of images, not the shoot total.

Done on a spreadsheet, that is fourteen running totals to maintain, recalculated every time a new batch of stills arrives, with a contractual breach waiting at the end of any arithmetic slip. It is the single most common place a production gets caught out.

They kept control, the platform did the arithmetic

WTA Media took our In-House package, running the process themselves while the platform enforced the contracts.

• We set up accounts for the film, the seven actors and the production team, and supplied Welcome Packs: each actor’s credentials plus a short guide.
• Actors and their representatives completed approvals entirely online, needing no support from us or from the production office.
• WTA could see each actor’s progress live, so nobody had to email an agent to ask whether their client had started.
• They uploaded every image from the shoot, including frames with no approval-rights actor in them, which built one master list of usable assets and saved hours when it came to packaging for distribution.
• Approval reports at the end detailed every cleared image.

The actors’ own feedback was that the platform saved their progress as they went, so a review could be picked up and put down rather than done in one sitting. For a cast of seven working actors, that is often the difference between finishing on time and not finishing at all.

When the photographer had already moved on

Partway through, the production hit a problem that had nothing to do with approvals. Their photographer had moved on to another job, and the remaining in-house team had never worked with RAW files.

We ran free one-to-one training on Adobe Bridge, covering how to save JPG duplicates from RAW at several output sizes and how to tag, rate and label images for a workable pipeline. We wrote it up as a step-by-step PDF as well, with links to our help portal, so nobody had to remember it all from one session.

WTA Media can now process large volumes of RAW images without outside help, on this production and every one since. That was not in the scope of work. It was cheaper than watching a client get stuck.

If every cast contract reads differently

Different minimums, solo and group splits, percentages measured per actor rather than per shoot: this is the arithmetic that makes manual approvals risky rather than merely tedious. The platform tracks each actor against their own contract and will not let anyone exceed what they agreed.

Tell us what your cast contracts say and we’ll set it up to match, whether you run it yourself or hand it over. Get a quote, or read how kill rights and percentages actually work.