Stakeholders · Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore

Delivering under two approval chains

Lead groom and simulation on a Warner Bros. production serviced by Imageworks — where notes arrived from an internal review chain and an external client, and both had to be satisfied without a second build.

Role: Lead — hair and cloth technical direction
Team: Groom and simulation artists, working to two review structures
Timeline: 2010 release
Constraint: Two independent approval chains with different priorities, neither of which reported to the other.
Outcome: Lead character work delivered through both without a rebuild — and a working understanding of how creative notes behave when the client sits outside the building.

The situation

Imageworks performed service work for other studios' productions. On those shows, notes came from internal supervision and from the client's own creative leadership, and the two didn't always want the same thing.

The failure mode is obvious in hindsight: satisfy one chain fully and you can find yourself rebuilding for the other.

What I took from it

Approvals are cheap to get one at a time and expensive to get in sequence. The work is in finding the build that survives both — which means understanding what each side is actually protecting, rather than treating their notes as a list to satisfy.

I've never managed an external agency. I have spent years delivering creative work into approval structures I didn't control, which is the same problem viewed from the other chair.

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