Rough cut or unfinished assembly for internal review — timing, VFX placeholders, editor's notes visible. Never shown to clients or press.
The Work in Progress (WIP) film is your working tool during post-production—not the final product. You assemble footage, insert placeholders for VFX, provisionally sync sound, and show the director or producer how the story works temporally and narratively. This is the stage where everything is still fluid: cuts are changed, scenes are shortened or extended, music is interchangeable. A WIP can look like a half-rendered draft—green boxes instead of final CGI, placeholder audio, color flags for unfinished grading work.
In practice, you'll need multiple WIP versions in succession. You lock one version, the director sees it, gives feedback, you edit accordingly, and show version 2.0. This often goes on for weeks. The difference from the actual Director's Cut or Final Cut: the WIP has no claim to quality, no clear release history, it's ephemeral. Some productions maintain edit lists in parallel—so the VFX supervisor or sound designer already knows which shots will remain final and which are still tentative.
Common mistake: Showing a WIP externally—at festivals, to investors, to broadcasters—and then being surprised when criticism arises about missing effects or rough cuts. A WIP is internal working language, not a means of external communication. If the producer or financier is to see a version, it's already a locked cut or at least a picture lock—meaning the edit is set, the sound runs in parallel, and the VFX shots are at least 80% defined. A WIP, on the other hand, can look completely different tomorrow.
In digital workflow practice, you often work with proxy material and low-res previews to edit quickly. The WIP takes advantage of this—it doesn't need to be high-resolution or color-calibrated. You export it as H.264, put it on a stick, or upload it to the project portal. The purpose: to accelerate the feedback loop without wasting time on final rendering. Only when the story edit is finalized does the actual technical finalization begin.