Volume is an engineering problem. We treated it like one.
Why this holds up
Ninety videos a month that look like one brand made them is either a staffing promise or an engineering one. Staffing promises break in month two. This page is the engineering one: what the studio built, who runs it, and the two ways it plugs into a brand.
- First angles live
- 5 working days
- Movement on every angle in flight
- Every working day
- Clients at a time
- 4
Our story
Second Unit started from a production problem rather than a business one. A post house can make one beautiful film in six weeks. A performance team needs forty arguments in six weeks, and every one of them has to look like it came from the same brand. Nothing in the industry was set up for both.
So the studio was built the other way round. Motion design, post and finishing came first, because that is the part nobody can fake. Then came the machinery that lets those crafts repeat: locked templates, a grade, a type system, a sound bed, character models, prompt libraries, render automation. All of it exists so the tenth cut in a batch gets the same care as the first, and so the person making it never redoes a decision that has already been made once.
It is the same craft behind work for Amazon Prime Video, Ford Motors, YouTube, Panasonic and John Frieda. What is new is the rate it runs at.
The studio
Small core, wide bench. The core team holds the pipeline and the standard. Specialists join per project, which is how a batch gets bigger without the work starting to look like it came from somewhere else.
Creative direction
Owns the argument and the look. Decides what an angle is trying to say before anything gets made, and whether the finished cut says it.
Motion, post and pipeline
Builds the rigs, the templates, the grade and the sound, then keeps the batch matching the first cut all the way to the ninetieth.
Open
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The bench
Editors, motion designers and generalists in other time zones, brought in per project and briefed into the same system. Work with us.
Two ways in
The pipeline is the same either way. What changes is who holds the brand.
Mode 01
The whole pipeline
You send the product. The studio proposes the angles off what is already selling, makes them, publishes them to your channels and reads what came back. You approve. That is the entire recurring obligation, and it is the version most performance teams without an in-house creative function buy.
Mode 02
Alongside the team you have
Your creative director keeps the brand and keeps the call. The studio works inside their system: their grade, their type, their rules, their queue. Nothing here takes work away from an in-house team. It takes the ninth cutdown of a hero film off them, and it gives them a production capacity they can direct rather than negotiate for.
Principles
Angles, not assets
The unit of work is an angle: one argument for why someone should buy. Ten cuts of an argument that is not landing is not a good month, so the studio is paid for arguments in flight rather than files delivered.
The system is built against evidence
Test angles go live in the first week. The brand system hardens around what those tests reveal instead of around a document written before anything ran.
Approval is the only thing on your plate
No briefs to write, no shot lists to review, nothing to export or upload. Yes, no, or a note, and the work carries on.
The brand system stays yours
Templates, grade, type, sound and the guidelines around them belong to you. The rigs and automations that make them fast stay with the studio.
Four clients at a time
Concurrency is the real limit, not headcount. It is why every angle in flight moves every working day, and it is why the roster is short on purpose.
Where the name comes from
On a film, the second unit is the crew that shoots everything the main unit cannot get to. Chases, crowds, plates, inserts, establishing shots, the hundred pieces of coverage that hold a scene together. Same script, same look, same notes, a different crew, running in parallel.
Nobody watching the finished film can tell which unit shot what. That is the entire job.