How UNIT Film & TV streamlined Picture Post on one of the BBC's most talked-about dramas using Origami
Production: Dear England - BBC One, four-part drama
Producer: Left Bank Pictures
Picture Post: UNIT Film & TV
Directors: Rupert Goold & Paul Whittington
Writer: James Graham
Director of Photography: Ole Bratt Birkeland BSC
Lead: Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate
Key UNIT Picture Post Team
- Louise Stevenson – Head of Film & TV
- Greg Elston – In-house Producer
- Maikel Popic – Workflow Manager
- Dan Coles - Colourist
- Simon Giblin – Online Editor & VFX Artist
- Maitland Buchanan – Head of Engineering
- Richard Evans – Head of MCR
Background
As England once again chases success on the world stage, Dear England has become particularly timely viewing.
Produced by Left Bank Pictures, the acclaimed studio behind The Crown, Behind Her Eyes and numerous other award-winning productions, the BBC drama tells the story of Gareth Southgate's transformation of the England national team and the culture that reshaped modern English football.
Behind the scenes, picture-post was completed by UNIT Film & TV.
Originally renowned for its commercial & VFX work, UNIT has spent the last 5 years successfully expanding into long-form television and feature picture post. Through strategic investment in talent, infrastructure and technology, the company has established itself as one of the UK's leading boutique post-production facilities.
By bringing together expertise across picture finishing, colour, engineering and VFX, UNIT offers something increasingly rare in today's market: the personal attention and client care of a boutique facility combined with the technical capability to deliver complex premium productions.
With picture post and VFX operating under one roof, the team is able to support projects from pre-production through to final delivery while maintaining close collaboration between departments.
For Dear England, that meant managing a sophisticated picture post-production workflow that included a LUT-per-shot colour pipeline, collaboration with DNEG for visual effects and CREEP for graphics, wrangling hundreds of archive shots, internal VFX work and moving multiple terrabytes of media through the facility.
The challenge wasn't creative capability.
The challenge was ensuring UNIT's talented team could focus on delivering the high levels of service, collaboration and finishing quality that clients expect, while keeping increasingly complex workflows running efficiently behind the scenes.
That's where Origami came in.
What is Origami?
Origami is a workflow automation and metadata management platform designed specifically for post-production and VFX.
Rather than replacing existing creative tools or established workflows, Origami sits alongside them, helping facilities manage media movement, metadata, colour information and delivery processes from a single platform.
By ensuring that media, metadata and creative context remain connected throughout the workflow, Origami helps simplify asset management and delivery between editorial, post-production, colour and VFX teams.
For facilities like UNIT, the benefit isn't simply speed. It's having confidence that the right media, metadata and colour information arrive in the right place at the right time, allowing teams to focus on supporting clients and delivering exceptional work.
The Challenge
Facilities like UNIT are built around expertise, relationships and creative collaboration.
Clients don't choose a post house because it can move files from one place to another. They choose a post house because of the people, the creative judgement, the problem-solving ability and the confidence that comes from working with experienced teams who care deeply about the final result.
But modern productions generate increasing amounts of operational complexity.
Every VFX turnover, shot pull and delivery request requires media retrieval, packaging, metadata validation and colour information to be managed accurately. None of these tasks are particularly visible to clients, but they are essential to keeping productions moving smoothly.
For Dear England, UNIT wanted to ensure that engineering and operational resources were being used as efficiently as possible, allowing the team to spend more time supporting colour sessions, finishing work and client-facing activity.
Across the project, Origami helped streamline the management of 86 separate workflows while ensuring media, metadata and colour information remained connected throughout the process.
What Origami Changed
Origami provided UNIT with a unified workflow for managing media retrieval, packaging and delivery across conform and VFX operations.
Rather than relying on multiple manual steps involved in preparing and delivering media, the platform automated much of the administrative work surrounding media pulls while ensuring metadata travelled alongside every delivery.
The impact wasn't measured by reducing involvement from the team.
It was measured by creating more time for the work that clients value most.
By reducing repetitive operational tasks, Origami enabled UNIT's team to focus more attention on supporting colourists, assisting clients and helping creative work move efficiently through the facility.
As Head of Workflow, Maikel Popic explains:
"It lightened my workload for certain tasks so I could focus more on support for the Colourist."
That shift proved particularly valuable on a production where collaboration, colour accuracy and creative finishing were central to the workflow.
Supporting a LUT-per-shot Workflow
One of the most technically demanding aspects of Dear England was its use of a LUT-per-shot colour pipeline.
While many productions rely on a small number of show LUTs, Dear England adopted a more sophisticated approach, with colour intent carried on a shot-by-shot basis throughout production.
The creative benefits were significant.
The operational challenges were equally real.
Each LUT needed to remain correctly associated with its corresponding shot throughout post-production, ensuring that colourists, VFX artists and external vendors were always working with the intended creative reference.
As Maikel explains:
"The production wanted to do more complex grading work during the shoot. So CDLs weren't enough in this case. Instead they created a LUT per shot."
Managing hundreds of LUTs across multiple platforms can quickly become time-consuming and subject to error without a robust workflow & metadata strategy.
Origami solved this by automatically associating the correct LUT with every pull and delivery package.
Rather than requiring teams to manually locate, verify and package colour information, the platform ensured it travelled with the media automatically.
For VFX vendors, the benefit was equally clear.
"The main thing the VFX company wants is an organised turnover with everything contained in there. Origami having the ability to track every delivery with the LUT in that package is a big plus."
The result was greater confidence in colour continuity and significantly less administration surrounding colour management.
Collaboration That Improved the Platform
One of the strengths of the relationship between UNIT and Origami was the collaborative approach taken throughout the project.
As real-world production demands emerged, feedback from UNIT's team directly influenced enhancements to the platform.
Increased Conform Capacity
Drama conform workflows involve significantly larger shot counts than traditional VFX turnovers.
Following feedback from UNIT during early testing, Origami expanded pull capacity to comfortably support large-scale episode conforms.
Local Conform Optimisation
The teams also worked together to develop a local conform workflow that removed unnecessary cloud transfers for internal operations.
By allowing media to move directly onto UNIT's server, conform operations became significantly faster while maintaining the same workflow consistency and quality control.
The result was a smoother experience for the engineers, artists and colourists working with the material every day.
What the Platform Delivered
Across the production, Origami supported four key workflow types:
External VFX Deliveries
34 deliveries to DNEG
Internal VFX Workflows
9 deliveries to UNIT's in-house VFX team
Graphics Deliveries
Supporting deliveries to CREEP
Drama Conform Pulls
39 deliveries to UNIT’s Grade Assist Suites
QA & Validation
4 support and testing workflows
In total, the platform managed:
- 86 workflows
- 3,119 unique clips
- Approximately 500,000 frames
- 3.69TB of media
- More than 5 hours of finished runtime
Throughout the project, media, metadata and colour information remained connected, ensuring that creative intent travelled alongside every delivery.
What This Means for Modern Post Production
For facilities like UNIT, the future isn't about replacing expertise with automation.
It's about creating more time for the creative and collaborative parts of the post-production process.
Dear England demonstrates how workflow automation can support modern post-production teams by simplifying operational complexity while preserving the high levels of client service and creative care that facilities like UNIT are known for.
By helping media, metadata and colour information move seamlessly through the pipeline, Origami enabled UNIT’s team to focus on what matters most: supporting clients, collaborating with creatives and delivering exceptional work on screen.
Because in post-production, great technology isn't about replacing creative expertise. It's about giving talented teams more time to use it.
Credits
Dear England was produced by Left Bank Pictures for BBC One and adapted by James Graham from his acclaimed stage play.
Directed by Rupert Goold and Paul Whittington.
Picture post was delivered by UNIT Film & TV.
With thanks to:
- Louise Stevenson – Head of Film & TV
- Greg Elston – In-house Producer
- Maikel Popic – Workflow Manager
- Dan Coles - Colourist
- Simon Giblin – Online Editor & VFX Artist
- Maitland Buchanan – Head of Engineering
- Richard Evans – Head of MCR
for their collaboration and insights throughout the project.
All workflow statistics sourced from the Dear England project record within Origami Platform.
Images courtesy of BBC / Left Bank Pictures.