Navigating the talent approvals process in film and TV production can be a time-consuming task, and ensuring that all actors involved are satisfied with their representation whilst adhering to contractual obligations requires detailed planning and organisation. We’re going to explore the best practices and tips for streamlining talent approvals, from effective photography direction to choosing a digital platform over printing contact sheets or sharing Dropbox links. By implementing these methods, your production will benefit from improved workflows, quicker and more secure cast approvals and an overall more positive experience for your talent and their reps, as well as your publicity and producing teams.
1. Photography Direction on Set
Before the talent approvals process begins, it’s first worth considering how you’d like your photographers to approach their shots on set in advance. Most established photographers already know what shots you need and what you don’t, but if you are working with upcoming photographers or those with less experience specifically within unit stills work, it’s worthwhile ensuring they know what coverage you are looking for so that you end up with the assets you need and not an excess of unusable crew photos.
Check out our Recommended Coverage PDF which you can send on to photographers in advance to ensure you have everything covered from dramatic solos and cinematic wides to details of key props, costume and plates for potential use as background composites for your posters. (We need to review the images in this PDF as they are not cleared for use. I’ll reach out to some of my previous photographic clients and see if we can obtain permission to use alternative example images that we can share.
2. Plan for Approvals During Pre-Production
It’s important to be in touch with your talent approvals team well in advance (if possible) so they can plan their schedule accordingly and do their best to accommodate your timelines, so that there is nothing holding you up from getting approval for those vital first look images. By getting in touch with your image approvals team ahead of your photographer’s first day, you can also reduce the costs of the approvals process as they will be able to advise the photographer on effective image delivery to make image handling much more streamlined and affordable for the production.
3. Image Delivery
Photographers should be aware of any image delivery specs that you or your talent approvals team require. We always recommend that RAWs are sent either in their native camera RAW format, with any sidecar .XMP files included with them, or as DNGs or TIF files. These formats ensure that any edits can be seen in the image preview whilst also enabling re-touchers the ability to revert back to the original RAW settings if needed.
If your photographer has graded their images, they should deliver these as high resolution JPGs in addition to the RAW files. To ensure the integrity of the approvals process, it is extremely important that their file names match their RAW counterparts EXACTLY, with only the file extension being different (i.e. .JPG or .ARW).
Consistent file naming and folder structures are essential to streamlining the approvals process, as it makes images and files easily accessible and identifiable for anyone working with them. Renaming files to follow a set protocol and clearly sorting folders reduces confusion, saves time and ultimately keeps the production more on schedule.
Check out our Image Delivery Specs to see what your photographers should prepare before delivering stills.
4. Backing Up and Security
For security, it’s imperative there is always more than one copy of your stills at any time. It is for this reason we strongly advise that your photographer retain a copy of the stills and that any images coming to us on a hard drive are a duplicate copy. To reduce risk to your assets whilst in transit, we can provide your photographer with an encrypted hard drive that they can copy their stills onto and send back to us.
Backing up files is crucial because you can’t always prevent unexpected technical failures, data corruption or accidental deletion. Doing regular backups protects you against data loss and provides peace of mind that your files are always available when needed.
When working with production stills, Image Approvals has several robust back-up processes in place to ensure the security and integrity of your assets at all times and follows strict timelines and purge processes so that we only hold your data for as long as is necessary.
5. Establish Cast Approval Rights
Before handing over the project to your talent approvals team, it’s helpful to have the cast’s approval rights ready and outlined in their contracts. Having these details to hand is useful for speeding up the tagging process and getting your images ready for reviewing as soon as possible. Be sure to provide your approvals team with the names of all cast with stills approvals rights before the images are shared so that group and solo images are categorized and kill limits calculated correctly.
The Image Approvals platform can detect the difference between solo and group images and enables you to input the talent’s contracted approval percentages so that they cannot kill more images than their terms allow, guaranteeing they all meet their contract requirements.
6. Don’t Create Actor Folders
Historically, managing cast approvals manually via contact sheets or applications like Dropbox required you to spend hours organizing your stills into actor folders. With an image approval platform you won’t need to do this anymore! Your approvals team will tag the actors into the images in which they appear and the stills approvals app will pick them up and show each actor only the images they feature in.
This also means you won’t have lots duplicate files all over the place when it comes to your group shots!
7. Budget for the Talent Approvals Process
Talent approvals are often forgotten about until post-production at which point you may not have any budget left for a stills approvals portal or management service, forcing you to spend days doing it manually with messy and insecure ways.
Get in touch with Image Approvals before your first day of shooting and we will be able to provide you with a fixed quote for your project as well as advice on how to reduce costs if there is a budget you are trying to meet.
8. Establish Your Tagging Preferences
Having a clear idea of how you want images to be tagged is highly beneficial for the approvals process and gives you the ability to choose between optimizing for actor and rep experience or maximizing legal protection for the production, depending upon the needs and priorities of your project.
Your talent will only see images in which they have been tagged, so inform your talent approvals team of how you’d like them to tag your images before the stills go through actor approvals. Some options you may wish to consider are:
- Tagging actors in every image that you can see them (even if it’s just the back of their head, they are significantly out of focus or otherwise only partially visible).
- To tag actors in images in which we can see their face enough to be able to easily identify them.
We recommend collaborating with your talent and their reps to establish their preferences so that all parties involved have a great experience and save time by seeing only the images they need to.
9. Use a Digital Platform for Approvals
Utilising digital platforms for talent approvals allows for easy reviewing and tracking of approvals. Opt for specialised software designed to make it as easy as possible for actors to make their kills and stakeholders to mark selects. The ability to export PDF contact sheets and spreadsheet reports are also useful for providing a transparent approval trail and keeping the process moving smoothly.
Check out our Case Studies page to learn more about productions who have used Image Approvals, or reach out to our team if you’d like to get a quote or see a demo.
