Same-day social cuts for Range

The problem

Range publishes one editorial reel every weekday. A host sits down at the desk and talks through whatever the money story is that morning: Tim Cook’s pay package, a Roth conversion rule, what a steel Patek trades for over retail. The stories are topical, so a reel that lands two days later has missed its moment. What arrives is a single take and a written brief. Everything else, the hook card, the explainer graphics, the receipts from the articles the script cites, the captions in Range’s style, the sound, has to be built and checked before it can go back, and it has to happen the same day, five days a week.

The pipeline

When Range uploads a take and a brief to Frame.io, the pipeline picks it up and gets to work. It transcribes the take and cuts it to the brief, taking out the restarts and the pauses. It designs the on-screen cards in Range’s hand-drawn style, pulls the headlines and charts the script refers to, finds the supporting footage, adds captions and sound effects, and mixes everything to the loudness the platforms expect. Before anything is sent, it checks the cut the way a picky editor would: every card lands on the right word, there are no gaps or flashes, the audio never clips, and the hook holds in the first two seconds. Then a person watches it and makes the creative calls, and the finished reel goes back to Frame.io. When Range’s team leaves notes, the changes are made on the same cut and a new version is up within hours.

The outcome

Range reviews a finished reel the same day it is shot, and notes come back as a new version the same afternoon rather than the following week. Twenty-one reels in the first five weeks, one for every weekday, each in the same house style with the same captions, the same card language and the same sound. The editor’s day now goes to the decisions that need one: which take, which joke, what the card should say.