The Production Pipeline Is Broken
I've been thinking about this since a conversation with a producer in Nairobi. She spent her entire morning looking for a three-paragraph brief. And she laughed about it, because that's just how production works now.
ProductWe Built a Production Platform. Here Is What It Does.
The actual problem in production isn't any single tool, it's the gaps between them. At some point I stopped complaining about it and started building.
IndustryThe Review Black Hole
Review and approval is the single biggest bottleneck across every production vertical I've worked in. Content disappears for days. Feedback scatters across five platforms. And someone always changes their mind on Monday.
IndustryNobody Manages Freelancers Well
Production is fundamentally freelance-dependent, yet the systems we use to manage freelancers range from inadequate to non-existent. Day rates in email threads, unsigned contracts, and billing chaos.
WorkflowYour DAM Is Not a Production Tool
Digital asset management and production media management are two different problems. Most teams need both, and the systems don't talk to each other. Content that can't be found has no value.
WorkflowWhat Happens Between the Brief and the First Frame
Pre-production is where most projects are won or lost, but it's treated as a checklist in most tools. A location permit is not the same shape of work as a script revision.
IndustryFifteen Tools and a Spreadsheet
The average creative team uses ten to fifteen tools per project. Each one is fine individually. The problem is what happens at the boundaries, every handoff between tools requires a human being to manually carry context.
IndustrySpeed killed the pipeline and nobody noticed
Somewhere in the last few years, the production industry decided that speed was the product. AI generates the script, AI cuts the rough, AI colours, AI subtitles. The pipeline got compressed into a blur. And then the talent release went missing.