Film and TV — cut to the shooting schedule

A translight is designed to be lit from behind, so the image transmits through the material rather than bouncing off it. That is what makes a night cityscape outside a window read as real depth instead of as a photograph on a wall. A front-lit backdrop is lit from the set side and behaves like any other printed surface. The choice is usually made by your gaffer and the stage layout rather than by the image — if there is room and power behind the backing, backlit almost always looks better through a window. Tell us which it is before we print, because the material and the file preparation differ.

Days rather than weeks for most work, which is why productions call us. The honest constraint is rarely our press — it is artwork. If a print-ready file at adequate resolution arrives in the morning, production is fast. If we are working from a scout photo that needs retouching and upscaling before it will hold at forty feet, that step sets the schedule. Call us as early as you can, even before the file exists, and we will tell you what we need.

Less than you would fear, because the camera is not standing six inches away. What matters is resolution at viewing distance, and for a backdrop that is usually well behind the actors and often slightly out of focus, the bar is far lower than for a printed graphic someone reads up close. Backlit work is the exception — light passing through the material reveals banding and JPEG artefacts that front-lit printing conceals. Send us the largest original you have, tell us the finished size and roughly how close the camera gets, and we will tell you whether it holds.

Yes, if it is specified for it. Roll-down flooring can be permanently installed or laid so it lifts and rolls up at wrap for reuse — the difference is in the adhesive and the substrate, decided before we print rather than after. Tell us at the quote stage if a floor has a second life planned. Productions that shoot recurring sets across seasons get the most out of this.

Most of this work comes to us that way — production designers, art directors, set decorators and construction coordinators, sometimes through a studio's own purchasing, sometimes direct. We are comfortable quoting from a concept frame or a location still rather than a finished file, and we will flag a problem with an image before it becomes a problem on the stage.