How the work is done

A completed environment either holds up or it does not; the causes of failure are ordinary and repeatable. A flat painting behaves like a single sheet as soon as the camera moves. The moment a colourist touches it, a painting that was matched to a monitor by eye detaches from the plate. When several artists divide a location, it drifts through one sensible choice after another, until the final shot stops matching the first. When no photograph of a period location has survived, the build rests on evidence of very uneven quality, and knowing the rung a detail came from separates a plausible frame from a guess. The pages in this section lay out those mechanics; they are not meant to teach the craft, but so the person reviewing the work knows what to inspect and what to request. Reading them should shorten a review, because the note that matters gets easier to identify.

Some failures begin before anyone paints. A shot pulled from an older cut, short of handles or carrying a reframe nobody flagged, takes its error through every department after it, and the order of those departments explains why a late note costs what it does. Photographs bring their own risk into a painting: light from one afternoon, a lens from another, and rights that stay with whoever took them. None of this needs technical training to follow. It needs the reviewer to know where in the order a problem was born, because that is usually where it is cheapest to fix, and these pages try to make that place easy to find.