Primetime Drama

The best cleanup work is the work nobody will ever see. Forty-eight shots across six episodes — rigs, crew reflections, modern street furniture and one very persistent boom shadow — all gone before the online.

The brief

A production company came to us in the online window of a six-part drama with a list that will be familiar to any post supervisor: safety wires on a rooftop sequence, a camera crew caught in a rain-soaked shop window, parking restrictions painted on a road that was supposed to be 1974, and continuity fixes that the edit had surfaced too late to reshoot.

How we approached it

Every shot was triaged in a single real-time review session — plates loaded into our pipeline and scrubbed live with the post supervisor on a call, so the shot list, method and quote were agreed in an afternoon rather than a week of emails. Wire and rig removal ran through planar tracking and clean-plate reconstruction; the period street was resurfaced with projected patches pulled from the production’s own location stills.

*Which is the point.

Drag the slider — plate stills to be added on client approval.

“Cleanup lists usually die by email thread. Reviewing the plates live with the post supervisor meant we agreed all forty-eight approaches in one sitting — that’s the real-time pipeline paying for itself before a single frame was painted.”

Daniel Evans — VFX Supervisor, vedrí