Case study: Chief of Station

“I’ve been producing for many years and it’s always a great pleasure to find a vendor who brings excellence to your project. This group is COMPETENT and ON IT from the moment they are engaged until they deliver in spades. One less hassle in the cornucopia of them in the delivery process. You won’t find a better company to handle your cast approvals. Really great!!!”

— Steve Jones, Producer · 5-star Google review

The production couldn’t see its own photography

Chief of Station had roughly 3,000 stills from its shoot. What the producing team could actually open was a small handful of low-resolution JPG selects the photographer had sent over.

Everything else was RAW. Camera RAW files need specialist software to read, and the production didn’t have it, so several thousand images sat on a drive as filenames. They could not judge their own coverage, could not send anything to cast, and could not tell whether what they had would satisfy a delivery spec. On a tight budget and a tighter deadline, that is a genuinely frightening position.

Converting first, so there was something to work with

We generated high-resolution JPGs from every RAW file. No specialist software for the production to buy, no extra storage to find, and for the first time the team could look at the whole shoot.

We also built custom pricing for the project. On this budget, if a managed service hadn’t been affordable, the production would have been left running approvals by hand, with all the contractual risk that carries.

Cutting 3,000 images down to 923

The instinct with A-list cast is to send everything and let them choose. It is the wrong instinct. Thousands of unfiltered frames means duplicates, blinks and out-of-focus shots landing in an actor’s inbox, and the review becomes a chore they put off.

So we curated first, taking the full set down to a working selection of 923 images while keeping:

• full scene coverage from multiple angles
• shots covering all key cast
• strong behind-the-scenes material
• supporting frames such as plates and prop details

The cast then approved 798 of them, an approval rate of 86%. That number is the argument for curation in a single figure. Show people only images worth approving and they approve nearly all of them.

Once cast had cleared the set, the producers marked their own 150 key selects for the press and marketing package.

Twenty-three working days, fully reported

Date	Milestone
July 21st	Original images received
July 31st	All images organised and online, ready for cast to approve
August 22nd	Approvals complete; organised images delivered to post-production team

Everything went back sorted into Killed and Approved folders in both RAW and JPG, an Approved Selects folder for the producers’ 150, and a full set of reports recording which images were killed, approved or selected, and by whom.

Steve Jones described the team as “COMPETENT and ON IT from the moment they are engaged until they deliver in spades”, which is the review you want from a producer who has been doing this for decades.

If your RAWs are a locked room

Plenty of productions are sitting on thousands of images they have never seen, because opening them needs software nobody on the team has. It is more common than anyone admits, and it quietly caps what your campaign can use.

Send us the drive. We’ll convert, organise and curate it, and you’ll see your own shoot properly for the first time. Get a quote, or read what our photo lab handles.