Automating On-Screen Consent for Sensitive Productions

Overview

In documentary and factual production, ensuring everyone on screen has provided consent isn't just good practice—it's a legal requirement. But in fast-moving, sensitive environments like hospitals, public spaces, and crowd scenes, tracking consent manually is a significant operational burden.

We partnered with Chwarel to design a consent workflow powered by AI face-matching that catches missing consents at the point of ingest—before they become expensive problems in post-production.

Who are Chwarel?

Chwarel is a media production company based in Wales, working on well-known productions across the UK. Their work often involves fast-moving, sensitive documentary settings where compliance is critical and the margin for error is slim.

The Challenge

Producers are responsible for ensuring anyone identifiable on screen has provided consent. On controlled sets with cast lists and planned scenes, this is manageable. But in dynamic environments—hospitals, public spaces, crowd scenes—it becomes genuinely difficult.

At Chwarel, this process was entirely manual:

After-hours review sessions. Producers stayed late after shoots, scrubbing through footage frame by frame to identify every face that might appear on screen.

Scattered, unsearchable records. Consent forms lived in folders, emails, and filing cabinets. Finding whether a specific person had consented for a specific project meant hunting through paperwork.

Unreliable follow-ups. When consent was missing, contact details were often incomplete or outdated. Chasing people down took time the production schedule didn't have.

Emergency edits. When non-consented faces were discovered late—sometimes days before delivery—the only option was expensive, quality-compromising blurs and edits.

The result: senior producers and directors spending valuable time on compliance admin instead of creative work, plus the constant background stress of not knowing whether something had been missed.

Our Solution

We designed a practical system that fits into the production day and integrates smoothly with post-production workflows.

On-Set Consent Capture

A simple interface for capturing consent on location. When someone signs a consent form, their photo is captured alongside structured data—name, contact details, project, date, scope of consent. Everything is digitised and searchable from day one.

AI Face-Matching at Ingest

When footage is ingested, our system automatically detects faces and matches them against the project's consent database. This happens in the background—no manual review required.

Smart Flagging for Follow-Up

Scenes containing unmatched faces are flagged with clear, actionable information: which frames, which faces, what's needed. Instead of reviewing hours of footage, producers get a focused list of items requiring attention.

Searchable Audit Trail

Every consent record is searchable by person, project, date, and status. Need to know if someone consented for a specific production three months ago? The answer is seconds away, not hours of digging through files.

Results

Significant reduction in after-hours review. The AI handles the tedious work of identifying faces, freeing producers from late-night footage scrubbing sessions.

Faster, more confident compliance sign-off. With a clear audit trail and automated matching, compliance reviews that once took hours now take minutes.

Fewer emergency edits. Catching missing consents early—at ingest rather than in the edit suite—means fewer last-minute blurs and compromised shots.

Time returned to creative work. Senior producers and directors can focus on storytelling rather than compliance admin.

A scalable workflow. The system works across productions, building an institutional consent database that becomes more valuable over time.