Case study: Vigil Season 2
By The ImageApprovals Team ·
- 1,900+ stills
- 1 approver
- Cleared in 1 day
- 4 working days end to end
“Thanks for your help on this project and I’m sure I will be in touch again!”
— Freddie A’Brassard, Senior Production Manager, World Productions
One approver, 1,900 images, one day
Vigil Season 2 is a BBC thriller series from World Productions. Twelve shoot days produced more than 1,900 stills, and a single principal cast member held contractual approval rights over the frames they appeared in.
That sounds like the easy version of this job, and in one sense it is. One approver means no competing kill allowances to reconcile and no group shots where one actor’s decision cancels another’s. But it also means the entire delivery waits on one person’s attention, and that person is working. Hand someone 1,900 unsorted images and the review becomes a chore to postpone. The schedule slips with it.
So the real task wasn’t volume. It was making one busy actor’s review short enough to finish in a sitting.
Making one busy actor’s review short enough to finish
World Productions sent us the raw files and we took it from there.
- Curated and tagged the whole set. Duplicates, test frames and misfires came out before anything reached the platform, so every image the actor saw was worth their time.
- Structured the folders first. Twelve shoot days only navigate cleanly if the organisation happens up front, rather than being retrofitted once people are already looking for things.
- Set up private accounts for the production team and the cast member, each with a short user guide, so nobody had to ring the production office to ask how to log in.
- Delivered the approved set with a full audit trail, including reports recording every selection and kill.
77% approved, in a single day
The cast member cleared the entire set in a single day and approved 77% of it, leaving the production with more than 1,400 cleared images for press, marketing and distribution.
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 16th August | Original images received |
| 16th August | All images tagged and uploaded to the platform |
| 21st August | Actor access granted for online approvals |
| 21st August | Approvals completed; images organised and delivered to the client |
Four working days, receipt to organised delivery, with no support requests reaching the production office along the way.
When your delivery rests on one diary
A single approver isn’t automatically the simple case. It concentrates the whole delivery on one person’s availability, which is exactly when a slow, awkward review process costs you weeks.
What fixes it is removing every reason to put the review off: a curated set instead of the full take, a private login that works as well on a phone as a laptop, and no spreadsheet anywhere in the process.
If that sounds like your shoot, tell us about it and we’ll scope it properly.