Bristol makes a kind of television almost nowhere else does. The BBC’s Natural History Unit started here in 1957 and stayed for sixty-five years, and in that time it seeded what the trade now calls “Green Hollywood”: the largest concentration of wildlife and factual producers on earth. Add Aardman, the independent stop-motion studio at Spike Island whose headcount swells sharply during a feature, and you have a city built on long-form, high-craft, footage-heavy production. The companies that grew up around those two anchors are exceptional at making content. What they are not set up for is seeing it, and that gap is what brings a production lead in Bristol to search for a software developer.
From the Natural History Unit to a City of Independents
The NHU is not the buyer here. Like the big group-owned broadcasters, an enterprise institution builds at its own scale and employs its own engineers. The buyers are the firms it spawned: roughly 190 independent production companies (the largest such sector outside London, with aggregate turnover above £288m) alongside a dense animation and post/VFX supply chain, all clustered in one mid-sized city.
These are operationally complex businesses that have grown fast and never had an engineer to wire their tools together. Wildlife and factual indies sit within walking distance of one another: Silverback Films (Wild Isles, Our Planet, now part of All3Media), Plimsoll Productions (ITV Studios took a majority stake for £103.5m in 2022), Wildstar Films (Fremantle took 51%), plus Humble Bee, Offspring, Icon Films and others. Around them sit the post and VFX houses (Films at 59 (Planet Earth III), Evolutions, Lux Aeterna, Moonraker VFX) and The Bottle Yard Studios, the council-owned complex whose TBY2 stages now host streamer drama like Netflix’s Seven Dials. Streamer demand drove a wave of acquisitions through this cluster, which means a lot of owner-managed firms suddenly carrying a bigger, more parallel slate on tooling that fit them when they were half the size.
The Tools a Production House Runs — and Where They Stop Talking
A Bristol indie running several productions at once is rarely short of capable software. It is short of one place to look. A typical stack reads:
- farmerswife for scheduling crew, edit suites and kit across overlapping jobs.
- Movie Magic Scheduling and Budgeting (the industry-standard production tools, distributed in the UK by Sargent-Disc, which also runs the freelancer payroll).
- A media asset manager such as Sohonet Core holding the footage library, with provenance and usage-rights metadata attached to each asset.
- Xero or Sage for the company’s own accounts.
Each is good at its job. None of them knows what the others know. So when an MD asks the only question that matters across a slate (which of our shows are on budget, on schedule, cleared, and signed off?) there is no single answer. There are four logins and an afternoon of cross-checking.
Footage, Freelancers and Sign-Off: Where the Margin Leaks
For this sector specifically, the disconnects bite in three predictable places.
Footage and rights. A wildlife indie’s archive is a reusable asset: the same sequence can earn across multiple commissions for years. But while the clips live in the MAM, the clearances, licences and usage windows live in spreadsheets. Reusing a shot becomes a manual hunt and a genuine rights risk, exactly where the library should be making money with the least effort.
Freelancers. Freelancing is the dominant employment model in Bristol’s screen sector, so every production stands up a different team. Onboarding, availability, timesheets and payment details get re-entered from scratch each time, even for people the company has booked repeatedly.
Approvals. Sign-off for commissioners (BBC, Netflix, Disney+, Apple) and co-producers happens over ad-hoc links and email. Versions get confused, and the delivery audit trail has to be rebuilt at the end instead of accruing as the work goes. Meanwhile production-accounting cost data from Movie Magic and Sargent-Disc never flows into Xero or Sage, so cost-against-budget and company-level reporting are reconciled by hand, after the fact, when it is too late to change anything.
Run one job and carrying data between these by hand is tolerable. Run a slate (as every firm here does) and the rekeying scales with the number of productions while the margin does not.
What We Build Around Your Scheduling and Production Accounting
The aim is almost never to replace the tools your crews already trust. It is to make them behave as one system.
- Integrations that connect farmerswife, Movie Magic / Sargent-Disc, your MAM and your accounting platform, so a production flows end to end instead of being rekeyed at every handoff. This is our core API integration work.
- A slate dashboard that answers the MD’s question directly: every live production against budget, schedule, clearance status and sign-off, in one live view built around how your company delivers.
- Rights and reuse tracking layered onto the asset library, so clearances and usage windows are queryable rather than buried in a spreadsheet.
- Freelancer onboarding and timesheet flows that capture details once and feed payroll and accounting, instead of restarting on every job.
- Structured client and commissioner review that turns email threads into tracked sign-off with a clean audit trail. This is the kind of custom software no off-the-shelf product will shape to your commissioners’ cycles.
This is the work for a fast-grown, owner-managed production business that has no developers on staff and no wish to hire any, which is precisely the case for a retainer over a permanent engineer, on a system we would keep maintained as your slate changes.
Working in Bristol’s Screen Sector?
If you can list every production currently in the building but cannot pull one view of which are on budget, cleared and signed off, that blind spot is the thing worth fixing first. Tell us which shows you are tracking in someone’s head or someone’s spreadsheet and we will work backwards from the picture you wish you could see to the integrations that would feed it. Screen production is one strand of our Bristol work.
