Studio Systems
The part of the studio you never see.
Every studio has two crews. One you meet at the premiere. The other lives in inboxes, split sheets, deal memos, and delivery specs — and it decides whether the first crew gets to keep making things. A few years ago we started building that second crew out of software. This page is about what happened.
Why we build our own tools
We were losing weekends to paperwork. So we taught the paperwork to file itself.
Independent film runs on margins too thin for a full back office. On our own productions, the choice was stark: spend our hours on coordination, or spend them on the work. We refused the trade. Instead we built small, careful systems — one for deal memos, one for the inbox, one for royalties — each designed to do a narrow job completely, and to hand anything ambiguous back to a person.
None of it was built to be sold. It was built because a two-person office had a film to deliver. That constraint — real deadlines, real money, our own names on the call sheet — is why these systems work. We were the first client, and the least forgiving one.
Case Study — Production
HOPE, a short film, and the office that ran it.
HOPE was produced in Atlanta under the SAG-AFTRA Micro-Budget Project Agreement — a framework with real compliance obligations and no budget line for a compliance department. Every cast and crew deal memo on the picture came out of a single template system: leads, supporting, day players, department heads. Drafts were generated, versioned into the right folder, and tracked through signature, with reminders going out on their own after seventy-two hours. Line sheets and budget cover documents stayed in sync as the schedule moved, and the agreement's checklist was watched item by item, so problems surfaced as flags instead of as phone calls.
"The production office was two people. The paperwork behaved like it had six."
Case Study — Music
Every artist, every split, every quarter — accounted for.
Lion Roar Music Group runs publishing for a roster of working artists, which means the unglamorous heart of the music business: split sheets, PRO and MLC registrations, sync paperwork, and quarterly statements that have to be right. We built them a single system that holds all of it. Each artist has a live dashboard — catalog, registration status, unsigned paperwork, sync activity — and the system generates royalty statements on demand, applying signed splits automatically and holding money in suspense when paperwork isn't done. Nothing pays out against an unsigned sheet, and nobody has to remember to chase a signature, because the system already did.
This is a working replica of that system, running on a sample roster. The numbers are illustrative; the behavior is real.
Case Study — Communications
Forty-seven emails before breakfast.
A production office inbox is a slot machine: an invoice, a sync request worth real money, a press deadline, and a stranger's "business opportunity," all in the same hour. We run a system that reads every inbound message, decides what it is, and acts — filing the invoice, acknowledging the journalist, archiving the noise, and walking anything involving money, legal exposure, or talent straight to a person. It answers in our voice, on our rules, and it keeps a record of every decision it makes.
Four messages from a real kind of morning. Pick one and watch it get handled.
Case Study — Marketing
The announcement is also a system.
A film's marketing is a handful of moments that can't be missed — a premiere invite, a festival run, a screener embargo, a quiet note to the people who backed you. We built a broadcast desk that holds those audiences (every one of them opted-in), drafts in our voice, schedules around the moment, and reports back on what landed. Same rules as everything else here: consent verified, unsubscribes honored, and a person approves every send.
Compose a campaign below. Audiences and numbers are sample data — the sync and the workflow are what we're showing you.
Outbound · Campaigns
Compose a broadcast
Opted-in audiences only. Every send carries an unsubscribe footer and hits the suppression list on reply.
Audience
Template
Subject
You're invited — HOPE premiere, one night only
Doors 7pm · Q&A with the director · reserved seat inside.
Schedule
Projected performance
Recipients
1,842
Est. opens
61%
Est. clicks
23%
Campaign history (sample)
| Campaign | Sent | Open | Click |
|---|---|---|---|
HOPE · first-look teaser Apr 12 · 1,402 recipients | 99.4% | 59% | 19% |
Festival announce · Q2 May 03 · 598 recipients | 99.7% | 63% | 24% |
Backer update · post-lock May 21 · 417 recipients | 100.0% | 72% | 39% |
Trade screener · embargoed Jun 07 · 231 recipients | 99.6% | 75% | 41% |
Illustrative data — client deployments report your real numbers, synced automatically.
What we run ourselves
One brief, before the first meeting.
Every morning at seven, a system reads our project trackers, inboxes, and document activity across everything in flight, and writes leadership a single brief: what moved overnight, what's blocked, and the two or three things that actually need a decision. It is the least cinematic thing we've ever built, and the one we'd miss most.
Working with us
We build these for other people now.
For a while these systems were a private advantage. Then the people we work with started asking for them. We now take a small number of engagements — typically six months — where we sit inside a company's actual workflow, build the systems it needs, and run them until they're boring. Boring is the goal. Engagements start with a two-week mapping of your actual workflow — you'll know exactly what we'd build before you commit to anything. If any of this looks like a problem you have, write to us.
Demonstrations on this page run on sample data. Client deployments run inside your own accounts and tools, with approval rules you set.