Case study: Anne Boleyn

“The Image Approvals service was such a life saver. They helped us unravel our unit photography into manageable folders that were easy for us and talent to navigate. Aimee’s team were patient as we went through the process and gave us guidance throughout. They are incredibly good value for money and I would work with them again in a heartbeat. Thank you Aimee and team!”

— Christelle Randall, Unit Publicist, Anne Boleyn · 5-star Google review

A drive on Wednesday, cast reviewing on Thursday

Anne Boleyn is a Channel 5 and Fable Pictures drama. Unit publicist Christelle Randall sent us a hard drive after wrap holding roughly 5,000 stills from several different photographers, and asked us to run the talent approvals.

Images landed with us on 26 January. They were online, tagged and ready for cast the following working day.

That gap is where most of the work sits. A set from several photographers arrives with different naming, different structures and no shared logic, and it has to become one navigable collection before a single actor can be shown anything. We tagged cast across the whole set, resized for the platform, uploaded, and built individual accounts.

Nobody rang the production office

Two cast members held approval rights. Three more people needed eyes on the stills and the ability to mark their own selects: Christelle, the producer, and a Channel 5 executive.

Five sets of logins is five opportunities for somebody to email the production office asking how to get in. So we sent Welcome Packs instead: each person’s credentials and a short guide to what they were being asked to do. The production fielded no support requests during the process.

That sounds like a small operational detail. It is usually the thing that decides whether cast finish on time, because an actor who can’t log in on the first attempt rarely tries again that week.

Photographer: Parisa Tag

Three weeks, and a clean handover

Date	Milestone
26 January	~5,000 stills received from Anne Boleyn
27 January	All images online and ready for cast approvals
17 February	All cast members completed their approvals

Five thousand images cleared in three weeks, with the publicist, producer and broadcaster all marking selects in the same place rather than in three separate email threads.

What went back was sorted into Killed, Approved and Approved Selects, with kill reports recording every action every user took. Christelle described the service as “a life saver”, which we suspect has less to do with the platform than with not having to unravel five photographers’ folders herself.

If your stills arrive as somebody else’s filing system

Multi-photographer sets are the normal case on a drama, not the exception, and they are the ones that quietly eat a publicist’s week. The unravelling has to happen before approvals can start, and it is the part nobody budgets time for.

We do that part. Tell us what you’re working with and we’ll tell you what it takes, or see how the approvals side works.