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Forager
"When I saw Shade, it was kind of like, oh, this is the ultimate evolution of what we're looking for. It just seems like it was made for our workflow."
Carlos Flores
Creative Director @ Forager
WEBSITE
HEADQUARTERS
Fully Remote
STRUCTURE
Remote / Distributed
INDUSTRY
Post Production / Creative Agency
SWITCHED FROM
Physical hard drives, multi-platform cloud tools
1
About Forager
A remote post house built without the walls of a traditional facility
Forager started without a multimillion dollar facility. No machine rooms, no shared servers, no infrastructure handed down from the broadcast era - just a group of people editing from their apartments, figuring out how to organize a post-production operation from scratch. That was always the identity: build a functioning post house without the overhead, and stay nimble enough to use whatever technology made that possible.
Over time, the work scaled. Forager now handles everything from traditional TV commercials and social media advertising to feature films, scripted TV content, and concerts for platforms like HBO. At any given time, the team is managing approximately 50 terabytes of storage - and the question of how to organize, share, and deliver that volume of media across a distributed team is never far from mind.
2
The Challenge
Too many tools. Too much friction. Too much momentum lost between platforms.
With other systems, Forager made it work - but making it work always came with a cost. The friction wasn't any single tool failing; it was the space between them. Assistants and artists were constantly downloading, uploading, and re-uploading across different platforms. Individually, those steps were manageable. Cumulatively, they drained momentum from every project.
The typical workflow looked like this: receive a physical drive, run a local ingest where an assistant organized the footage, upload to a cloud platform, then distribute across all the different channels that needed access. As Forager's work expanded into more complex long-form territory - with online/offline deliveries, color, sound, and VFX all requiring separate handoffs - they tried to bring more structure to the process. But no single system connected it all.
The work kept growing. The tools kept multiplying. And the gaps between them kept creating drag.
Learn why top agencies, global brands, and high-growth enterprises use Shade.
3
Introduction to Shade
The platform that matched the workflow they'd been building toward all along
For a team that had spent years describing themselves as "pirates" - scrappy, tech-forward, always hunting for tools that let them run a real post operation without a traditional post facility - Shade registered differently than other platforms.
When Forager first saw it, the reaction wasn't skepticism. It was recognition. After years of manually stitching together a patchwork of specialized tools, here was a single platform that could handle the full post-production lifecycle: from first media received to final delivery sent. The idea of a unified ecosystem wasn't just appealing. It was exactly what they'd been trying to build on their own.
"When I saw Shade, it was kind of like, oh, this is the ultimate evolution of what we're looking for. It just seems like it was made for our workflow."
Carlos Flores
Creative Director @ Forager
4
The New Workflow
From ingest to delivery - inside one ecosystem
Forager now runs their entire post-production pipeline through Shade. The workflow is as unified as it sounds:
Ingest: Productions deliver proxies or raw footage directly to the team's Shade account via a shared upload link - no intermediate drives, no manual transfer step in between.
Organization: Once footage arrives, the team organizes it inside Shade and begins pulling for editorial directly from there.
Editing: Editors pull from Shade into their editing software without needing to transfer files locally first.
Finishing prep: After the cut is locked, the team prepares deliverables for color, sound, and VFX - all within the same Shade ecosystem.
Final delivery: The finished project goes to the client through Shade as well.
The result is a workflow with no platform handoffs, no re-upload steps, and no gaps between where media lives and where work gets done.
5
Present Outcome
A virtual post house with real infrastructure
For a team that built their identity around doing serious post work without being tied to a facility, Shade represents something more than a tool upgrade. It's the infrastructure layer that makes the whole model sustainable.
Everyone on the Forager team - regardless of where they're working - can view, share, and access media in the same place. The download-upload cycles that used to chip away at project momentum are gone. The handoffs between finishing departments no longer require stepping outside the ecosystem. And what once required coordinating across multiple platforms now happens inside one.
After years of slowly building a virtual post house piece by piece, Forager found the platform that ties it all together.
