Castifi Casts Background Actors for Complex Original Series GROWN

Castifi, a film tech startup based in Culver City, announced today its involvement with Complex.com's digital series, GROWN, produced by Adaptive Studios.

Castifi provides a software platform for film productions to find, hire, manage, and pay cast and crew members. This enables productions to source from Castifi's vetted network of thousands, sending all start paperwork, time cards, and payroll digitally through one of their integrated payroll partners. Castifi was used by the production teams for the show GROWN during casting, which resulted in operational efficiencies and reduced costs.

The GROWN team utilized Castifi's Cast & Crew Member app, as well as its On Set app to manage the production. While casting, GROWN production team sourced background actors through the platform. Once selected, the background actors received a notification about the production call time, location address, wardrobe photos, and hair/makeup notes, through the Cast & Crew Member app.

Background Actors then confirmed their availability and attendance, which notified the production they would be attending. Once the actors arrived on set, the production assistant used the Castifi On Set app to clock them in/out and add pay bumps. The PA also received alerts when background actors were approaching overtime. Once wrapped, the payroll was automatically calculated based on the digital timecards and ready for payroll submission. This eliminated the need for paperwork on set and allowed the production to save hours on administrative and payroll tasks.

GROWN, about two Haitian Americans growing up in Miami trying to figure out what it means to be a man, was filmed in Miami Castifi worked to cast over 400 extras for a variety of roles across 28 days of production.

With Castifi's platform, Adaptive Studios was able to streamline the casting process and reduce hours of administrative tasks and paperwork processing. Castifi sourced all background actors through their booking platform, sent tax and release forms electronically, tracked time digitally via their app, and paid out the actors within 24-hours.

"We know that Adaptive produces high-quality, large-scale productions in a highly efficient manner... they were the perfect partner to use Castifi throughout their process," says Castifi CEO and founder Rumala Sheikhani.

"Castifi took the responsibility of casting and managing extras completely off of our plate. They helped free up critical time for our team, which gave everyone the ability to focus and create this great show," adds Kate Grady, VP of Production at Adaptive.

Extras casting and crew management are common problems for production companies as they scale for distribution into Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, and other streaming platforms. Castifi has built a unique system from the ground up offering last mile support by providing proprietary software for production teams on set.

About Castifi Inc.
Castifi is a digital platform to find, hire, manage, and pay cast and crew. The current industry standard of casting and managing production staff is a paper-based process of time cards, paperwork, and cutting physical checks for everyone on set. Moving from Big 4 public accounting at PwC to production accounting at NBC, CEO/Founder Rumala Sheikhani was inspired to create software tools to improve efficiency and streamline casting and crew management. Castifi was founded in 2015, and now over two hundred and fifty productions later; the company is living the vision of digital cast and crew sourcing, management, and payroll.

For more information about Castifi, visit http://www.castifi.com or follow them on Instagram @castifiapp to see what they're up to.

About Adaptive Studios
Adaptive Studios is an Emmy-winning entertainment studio taking a story-first approach to creating premium content for emerging and traditional platforms. The company acquires undervalued intellectual property from the Hollywood system in addition to incubating fresh ideas from a community of passionate, emerging filmmakers. Adaptive reimagines how film, television and digital projects are developed, produced and distributed.

Adaptive's partners include high profile collaborators and distributors such as AMC Networks, HBO, Netflix, Verizon, Miramax, FX Networks, Fox Animation, 21 Laps, Lionsgate, blackpills and many more. Visit adaptivestudios.com for more information.

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