Follow every shot from bid breakdown to final delivery, with the artist hours and client notes behind it.

A VFX company sells shots. A show may hold a few hundred of them, and each shot moves through several departments, with a new version after every round of client notes. Margin depends on how many rounds a shot takes against what the bid allowed. Rounds add up fast.

Most studios follow this across a tracking sheet, a review tool, a scheduling sheet and an accounts package. A supervisor who asks which shots are over their bid usually waits for a producer to build the answer by hand. That takes an afternoon.

A producer wins a show from a script breakdown and a bid built per shot, with an assumed number of artist days for each department. Once the show is awarded, the shots are loaded into a tracker with a supervisor, a lead and an artist for each. Plates arrive from the client or the production house, and the data wrangler logs the format, the lens data and any missing reference. Artists submit versions to the daily review. The supervisor adds notes and approves the shot or sends it back. Client notes arrive after each submission and are copied into the tracker by the coordinator.

The scheduler books artists across shows by the week. Peaks come and go. Freelancers join for a peak and leave, and their rates and contracts are held apart. Render time on the farm and software licences are shared by every show, and nobody owns the full count. At the end of a milestone, the producer sends an invoice for the shots delivered. Packages go out in the format the client named, checked against a note that one coordinator keeps.