From Tate to TX: A Fast Turnaround Film in MotionHub

Chalk Productions, a MotionHub client, was commissioned to make a film for The One Show about Tate Britain’s exhibition on the 1990s. The turnaround was days, not weeks – and the producer had a rough sync pull ready within hours of sitting down to the edit.

Topical TV doesn’t wait. On a schedule like that, it’s rarely the filmmaking that slips. It’s the admin around it: the paperwork, the logging, the hunt for the right line in hours of rushes. Here’s how the team ran the whole production in MotionHub, start to finish.

Sorted before the shoot

The project went into MotionHub the day the commission landed. Contributors were signed up before anyone picked up a camera, with consent handled digitally and every release filed against the film. No clipboards, no chasing signatures on the day.

The archive went in early too. A film about the 90s lives or dies on its archive, and Chalk uploaded it before filming, so it was transcribed, catalogued and searchable alongside everything else rather than sitting on a separate drive.

Tasks were allocated across the team, each with an owner and a date, so everyone knew what they were responsible for and what was still outstanding. On a short schedule, nothing falls through the gap because someone assumed someone else had it.

Rushes up before the crew left

This is where fast turnarounds usually lose a day. The drive goes back to the office and someone sits down to log it.

On the Tate shoot, the rushes were uploaded on site. AI transcription ran on the interviews and AI cataloguing identified the contributors, so every clip was labelled with who was in it before the crew had even wrapped.

Logs, script and sync pull in hours

The next morning the producer had everything in one place: the new interviews, the archive and the transcripts. The rushes logs became a job of reviewing and marking up, not typing from scratch.

Semantic search found lines by what they were about, not where they sat on the timeline. Search for something like this, and MotionHub finds the answer even if those exact words were never said:

“What it felt like to be young in London in the 90s”

Claude can do the legwork too. Ask it for the strongest lines on a theme and it pulls them, sets the in and out points and drops them into the edit script.

Each scene in the script carried its clip, timecode and transcript, with new interviews and 90s archive side by side. The producer built the shape of the film from both at once, reordering and swapping answers while the story was still cheap to change. The rough sync pull was ready in hours.

Straight into the suite

The edit script exported as an EDL, so the editor opened a timeline with every clip, in and out point and the running order already in place. No retyping timecodes from a Word document. No “which take did you mean?”. The editor’s time went on pace, music and the 90s look – the craft, not the admin.

Nothing lost after TX

When the film went out, there was no clean-up week. The releases were filed, the tasks were ticked off, and the rushes and archive stay transcribed and searchable in MotionHub. When the 90s come round again – and in TV they always do – every usable moment is a search away.

Why it matters

Fast turnarounds are where production companies earn a commissioner’s trust. Deliver clean and on time, and you’re the first call when the next story breaks.

MotionHub didn’t make the creative calls on the Tate film. The team did. What it did was clear the admin out of their way – the paperwork before the shoot, the logging after it, the sync pull the next day – so their time went into the film.

Try it on your next quick turnaround

Got a topical film coming up? Run it through MotionHub from day one – contributors, archive, tasks, rushes and script, all in one place.

👉 Book a demo or start a free trial and see how fast your next TV film can move.