Severn STM Limited
A television programme production company working out of Mount Stuart Square in Cardiff Bay.
The company is registered in England and Wales and records a single trade against its name at Companies House: SIC 59113, television programme production activities. Programme-making is therefore the whole of the business, not one service among several, and the office at Mount Stuart Square is where development, production paperwork and delivery are run from.
What follows is set out as chapters, in the order a programme actually travels: an idea is developed, it is produced, it is finished and delivered, and somebody has to be spoken to before any of that begins.
Development
Development is the stage where an idea is made answerable. A premise becomes a treatment or a format document, the shape of an episode is argued out, and the run is costed against a schedule that a crew could actually keep. If those two documents do not agree with each other, nothing later in the process will rescue them.
Rights and clearances are settled at this stage instead of at the end of the process. Where a programme depends on archive, on music, on a location that must be closed, or on contributors who need to understand what they are agreeing to, the permissions are identified while the shape of the programme can still change to suit them.
A treatment that cannot be scheduled remains an ambition; a schedule that ignores the treatment is guesswork.
Production
Production covers both studio and location work. The company books crew and equipment for the format that has been chosen, issues call sheets, arranges location agreements and filming permissions, carries the insurance and risk assessments that a shoot requires, and keeps continuity coherent across a run of episodes.
Contributor paperwork is treated as part of the shoot itself. Consent and release forms are taken at the point of recording, logged against the material they cover, and kept with the rushes so that the edit is working from footage it is entitled to use.
Rushes are backed up and catalogued as they come in. A programme that loses track of which card holds which scene has already lost days it will not get back in the edit.
Post-production and delivery
The edit builds the episode from assembly to fine cut. Picture is graded for consistency across cameras and conditions, and the sound is mixed to the loudness standard the destination applies rather than to whatever sounded acceptable in the room.
Delivery to a broadcaster or platform is a documentary exercise as much as a technical one. Access services such as subtitles and audio description, compliance viewing notes, music cue sheets, programme-as-completed paperwork, technical quality control and the archive master all form part of the same handover, prepared to the written specification the commissioning body issues.
Working with a commissioner
An approach usually arrives as a brief, a slot to be filled, or an idea somebody wants tested. The company reads it, asks the questions that decide whether it is affordable, and comes back with an outline, a schedule and a budget. Enthusiasm on its own settles none of those questions.
If that is accepted, the deliverables and the dates are written down before production starts: episode count and duration, the technical specification, who holds which rights, and what the finished handover consists of. Everything after that point is measured against that document; where recollection and the paperwork disagree, the paperwork decides.
Production companies are judged on whether the thing arrived, in the state that was agreed, on the day that was agreed. The rest is decoration.
Contact and registered details
Enquiries about commissions, availability, schedules or material already in production come to one address.
- Registered nameSEVERN STM LIMITED
- Registered office3 Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff, CF10 5EE, United Kingdom
- Company number14129215
- D-U-N-S228964424
- SIC59113 — television programme production activities
How the company handles personal information is set out in the data notice.