As the broadcast industry is evolving toward IT-based facilities, the production workflows and their associated production metadata should similarly take advantage of IT commodities. This paper presents a manufacturing system for the production of drama television and motion picture programmes, constructed using IT-based technologies in a filebased media environment. This drama production facility implements a production workflow based on common industrial manufacturing processes and extensively models the individual aspects of the drama production process. We aim to show that the different processes contained in this manufacturing workflow can be expressed in terms of elementary building blocks, the canonical processes of media production. By identifying recurring and canonical functionality, process implementations can be simplified and input and output from different processes can be coordinated for better integration with external systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1 [M...