Hand over to a new agency

What this is about

Handovers fail in a predictable way. The masters arrive, everyone is satisfied, and six months later the new team needs a textless version, a font licence or the camera original of one shot, and none of it exists outside a drive at the previous agency. Whether the client is entitled to those files is a contract question that should have been answered when the work was commissioned, not when the relationship ends. Doing the handover well is also professionally self-serving: the outgoing agency that delivers a clean, documented package is the one that gets recommended, and occasionally called back.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Clarify ownership from the contract first: masters, project files, camera originals and licences are four separate questions
• Music and stock licences are often not transferable — check the terms rather than assuming the file travels with the film
• Fonts have their own licences and frequently cannot simply be copied into the next agency's project
• Hand over accounts and channels by transferring ownership, never by sharing a password
• A handover without a written inventory is a pile of files, and nobody can tell later what was missing

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Read the contracts before packing anything. What the client owns, what was licensed and what remains with the agency determines the content of the handover and prevents an argument later.
2. Write an inventory first, files second. List every production with its masters, textless versions, project files, camera originals, graphics, licences and releases, then pack against that list.
3. Consolidate each edit project so its media, graphics and fonts sit inside the project folder, and note the software version it was built in. A project nobody can open is not an asset.
4. Separate what cannot be transferred and say so explicitly: non-transferable stock licences, agency-owned templates, fonts under the agency's own licence. Silence here becomes a legal problem for the client.
5. Transfer channel and tool access by ownership rather than credentials — video platform, analytics, scheduling tools, cloud storage — and remove your own access when it is complete.
6. Add the working knowledge that is not in any file: brand decisions and their reasons, contact people at the client, locations and their access rules, and which participants gave consent for what.
7. Deliver on physical media or a controlled transfer with a checksum, and get a written confirmation of receipt. Large transfers fail silently, and the failure is discovered months later.
8. Offer one handover call with the incoming team. An hour of context saves them a week and costs you the reputation you would otherwise lose in the retelling.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Handing over compressed web files and calling it the complete archive
• Passing on a project file whose media still point at a drive in your office
• Sharing account passwords instead of transferring ownership of the channels
• Discovering during the handover that the client never owned the music licences

With TillyGen

Briefs, shot lists, schedules and participant lists in TillyGen are part of what changes hands — the incoming team inherits how the productions were actually organised, not just the finished files.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.