Case study: The Undeclared War

“Image Approvals managed our stills approvals for ‘The Undeclared War’ as well as series 2 and 3 of ‘All Creatures Great and Small.’ They are a joy to work with and their software is so user friendly, both for talent and producers/PR folks. I’ve used several other platforms in the past but this is far and away my favorite. Highly recommended!”

— Rhys Kimmitt, Director of Production at Playground Entertainment · 5-star Google review

Eight actors to clear, with selects needed in parallel

Playground Entertainment’s Channel 4 drama The Undeclared War produced over 20,000 stills across 31 days: unit photography and gallery shots, from several photographers, arriving day by day and organised by nobody.

Eight cast members held approval rights, and that number is a serious coordination load in its own right. Every additional actor adds another set of contractual percentages to track and another diary to wait on, and eight of them reviewing in sequence would have run well past the delivery date.

Meanwhile the production’s own stakeholders needed to mark their selects to the same delivery clock. On most jobs that work queues up behind the cast, because you cannot select from an approved set that does not exist yet.

Running the two in parallel

We gave key stakeholders a Production Account so they could mark selects while cast were still working through their approvals, rather than after. Two processes that normally run end to end ran side by side, and the second one stopped being a bottleneck.

Everything upstream of that was groundwork:

• A working duplicate of the drive, so the master files were never touched while we reorganised.
• Unit and gallery images separated into navigable folder structures.
• Every file renamed with unique, descriptive information, so post-production and distributors could locate a specific frame instead of opening twenty.
• Curation down to around 10,000 images, because eight actors could not reasonably review twenty thousand and nobody benefits from asking them to.
• Accounts and Welcome Packs for all eight cast, credentials plus a short guide, forwarded on by production. No support requests came back.

Four days at each end

Date	Milestone
29th September	Original images received
6th October	All images organised and live for cast to approve
8th November	All cast approvals completed
15th November	Stills drive delivered to the post-production team

Four working days to take a disordered 20,000-image delivery and put a curated, renamed, tagged set in front of eight actors. Four more, from the final approval, to hand the post-production supervisor a drive sorted into killed, approved and approved-selects folders with kill reports attached.

The month in the middle belonged to eight cast members and their representatives, which is the part no one can compress.

Rhys Kimmitt has since used us on two series of All Creatures Great and Small, and describes the platform as his favourite of the several he has worked with. A comparative endorsement from someone who has tried the alternatives is worth more than a five-star rating.

If your cast list is long

Each actor you add multiplies the coordination rather than adding to it: another percentage to track, another representative to reach, another review that has to finish before the set is final. Past four or five, running it manually stops being tedious and starts being risky.

Eight was comfortable here. Tell us how many actors you’re clearing, or read how approval percentages are tracked across a large cast.