one shoot, a hundred posts
four years of social media production for a us apparel brand, cut from single shoots into a weekly feed across website, instagram and tiktok.
inkerman shoot beautifully and infrequently. the problem was never the film, it was the gap between one expensive shoot day and a feed that wants something every week. we built the pipeline that closes that gap, turning each shoot into months of platform native material without sending anyone back out with a camera.
a feed does not care how good the shoot was
a brand film is one artefact. a social channel is an appetite. inkerman were producing cinema and then rationing it, because every new post meant another edit, another export, another round of approvals.
the two formats also fight each other. a landing page wants sixteen by nine and room to breathe. instagram and tiktok want nine by sixteen and the subject dead centre. cropping one into the other loses the composition every time.
so the real brief was not to make more films. it was to design a system where one shoot already contains every cut the year is going to ask for.
we stopped treating the shoot as the deliverable and started treating it as the source.
from one summer shoot to a weekly engine
two years apart, the same brand, two completely different production models.
- a single july shoot on the water: sailing, the tug boat, diving
- every master cut twice, sixteen by nine for the site and nine by sixteen for social
- fourteen vertical reels built from the same source footage
- 12,416 frames pulled as stills, so the channel never needed a photographer
- every cut delivered with sound and silent, because a feed autoplays muted
- production moved inland for autumn and on to a weekly rhythm
- nine subject buckets: boat, farm, ladder, truck, trail, shed, woodshed, stairs, fireplace
- 61 cuts delivered across three weeks
- 22 of those also rendered clean, without the wordmark, for partner and paid use
- vertical first, because by 2026 that is where the audience actually was
one master, both ratios
the same locked off shot, finished twice. the wide cut carries the landing page, where there is room for the walk to happen. the vertical cut re-frames to the subject for instagram and tiktok, where the phone is the whole canvas. neither is a crop of the other, both are graded from the same master, which is why they still look like one brand.
the weekly engine
by 2026 the pipeline had a calendar. each week took a small set of subjects and ran them all the way through, so the feed was never waiting on a shoot. the subjects are deliberately ordinary: a ladder against a woodpile, a truck at the trailhead, a fire that has just caught. ordinary is what sustains a weekly cadence.
the library underneath
every frame the pipeline produces is an asset. stills are pulled straight from the graded masters rather than shot separately, so the photography and the film can never drift apart. the brand ends a shoot week with a library it can post from for months.
