How Aframe helped Drama Republic

Drama Republic is a dynamic, new, independent television production company in the heart of London’s Soho, specialising in high quality drama.

Written, produced and directed by BAFTA winner Hugo Blick, “The Honourable Woman” is an eight part political thriller starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, set against an international backdrop in the US, the Middle East and London.

Challenge

The Honourable Woman’s workflow involved distributing daily rough assemblies from footage shot in the UK and Morocco to a group of exec producers, directors and editors on location and in the production office.

The production team demanded a powerful platform that could limit access to certain members of the team, facilitate the ability to view clips on mobile devices and the option to download selected clips for offline viewing on laptops and PC’s.

Solution

Productions of this scale often use standalone dailies systems that are costly and hard to use. Aframe’s cloud video platform allowed cuts to be uploaded swiftly, stored securely in the cloud and made ready for review immediately to a geographically dispersed team of professionals on the move – without the need of expensive hardware.

Drama Republic had edit assistants upload proxies to Aframe’s secure private cloud, where Aframe created a link to the clips and automatically sent it with an expiration date to team members and execs, who could review and approve content online, or download it for viewing offline.

“With over three months’ worth of filming on location in the UK and Morocco, Aframe gave us a platform that let all our production team keep in touch with the latest cuts and promos each day – across our entire workflow,” said Susy Liddell, Director of Production for Drama Republic.

Aframe’s accelerated web uploader and desktop app are able to deliver over 15x faster uploads than FTP and with far greater reliability; with the ability to pause and resume and intelligently handle connectivity issues to avoid corrupt files and frustrating restarts. When reviewing the footage, Drama Republic were able to stay on top of the edit and provide feedback on changes that needed to be made. This permitted editors to generate a faster turnaround in decision-making and deliver a more cost effective edit.

Project administrators could control who had access to the media with Aframe’s permissions structure and share links with expiry dates, ensuring that IP was protected and monitored at all times. Coupled with Aframe’s multi-layered cloud infrastructure and FACT certification, Drama Republic’s content was completely safe in the cloud.

Results

“We appreciated the added peace of mind that Aframe provided in letting us control who could view content, and during specified time windows – while still being easy to use for everyone. That includes the edit assistant doing the uploading and sharing, to the producers and directors viewing content on mobile devices.” Susy Liddell, Director of Production for Drama Republic.