TO THE FINISH LINE
Demand for Zeb’s approach outstripped supply and with partner, David Grewal, Zeb scaled up The Finish Line offering freelance finishing talent. Soon these freelancers became employees. They hired Jonathan Blessley in 2014 (who remains as COO today) who notes, “I was brought in to manage the business from a small office in Kensal Rise where we did the QC and delivery work. We built our first MCR with Digi-betas, SR decks and standards conversion; constantly evolving based on client needs and what supported our talent best. “Zeb has always been an innovator. We had virtualised edit suites in 2014 but couldn’t communicate the offer as the benefits were not understood. We were doing it nonetheless. When Covid came, we were more than fully prepared.” Zeb’s core values around better working culture and supporting mental health resonated with other post professionals and the company is 50/50 gender neutral, “which took years of investment. We let people control their workload so that they can prioritise family life as needed. Our adaptive workflow enables this. Performance can still be measured, and we create clear, supported paths for employees to develop into more senior roles.” It remains a different but more efficient,
customer-centric way of delivering picture post. “We didn’t want to do the client services with a conveyor belt approach and long hours then, and we don’t now. It’s important to stay true to our principles.”
Calm Under Pressure
Faced with a fast turnaround, topical documentary following the Lionesses’ Euro 2022 victory, the teams at The Finish Line and Vaudeville rose to the occasion. The Finish Line were involved from the outset supporting an agile and elegant workflow with media ingest, remote access edit suites, cloud viewing platforms and conform services ahead of final picture and audio finishing.
Zeb grading with Resolve on a Flanders’ monitor
The ’80s Top 10 Watercooler Moments, Nutopia
Lionesses: How Football Came Home, Ad Hoc
Josh Taylor: Portrait of a Fighter, Ad Hoc
vaudeville.tv
“I’d already been impressed with The Finish Line and Vaudeville’s post approach on several of our documentaries, including their work on ‘Josh Taylor: Portrait of a Fighter’ for BBC1 and the Amazon Original Feature doc Elizabeth Windsor. So, we were happy to repeat the experience on Lionesses: How Football Came Home. “Our partners Altitude Film Entertainment and SKY Documentaries needed the Lioness film turned around VERY quickly, in time for a Christmas release. We were greenlit just a few weeks after the Lionesses’ Euro win and rolled into production in September with a hard out for late November. With such a high profile and important story, I knew there’d be a lot of eyes on it, so a huge responsibility and quite rightly a lot of high expectations swirling around. There was a lot riding on it - an immovable deadline and a high-quality film that we needed to deliver on time and on budget.
“There were of course a multitude of moving parts to put together, from a production, talent and post production perspective, far too many to discuss here in detail. The Finish Line were super flexible and helped us implement remote access edit suites, media ingest, cloud viewing platforms and conform services all the way through to the finishing stage, including final audio mixing at Vaudeville. They were flexible when parameters needed adjusting and were positive, never negative, as post production needs evolved.
“It was quite a ride, but the entire Ad Hoc production team, The Finish Line and Vaudeville were extraordinary, moving mountains to pull it all off. SKY and Altitude were delighted with the end result. I’m happy to say the film was released theatrically ahead of its SKY premiere and critically well received. And it was delivered on time and on budget. As a story and as a project, we’re incredibly proud of it and very grateful to the entire post production team for helping us realise it.”
Dan Glynn Co-Founder Ad Hoc Films
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