The team carefully mapped each camera shot onto a series of cartooned story boards and found a music-library clip of jangling guitars that sounded like ZZ Top (but happily for the budget, wasn’t) for the soundtrack. No detail was left to chance; once they found a model, they equipped her with carefully selected semi-trashy earrings and nails.

“The spot only lasted 30 seconds, but something like 200 man-hours, maybe more, went into it,” says Adam Cronan, the 2C Media editor who worked on the promo. “It was all pretty exciting. On a lot of these promos, we’re just hunched over a screen, looking at clips and cutting them down. But this was like doing a miniature version of a big studio movie.”

Even more labor-intensive are 2C Media’s reality shows, which require editing hundreds of hours of video footage down into coherent story lines of 30 to 60 minutes. The company has produced or co-produced six of them, including Animal Planet’s Swamp Wars, which follows a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue unit that deals with snake bites, and CMT’s Danger Coast, about South Florida cops who work the waterfront. The most ambitious yet is the new show set at the airport, which required approval from about a dozen government agencies.

“That one was the hardest to set up, but none of them are easy,” Carla says. “You can’t really sell reality shows on paper, so we have to do a ‘sizzle reel,’ kind of a seven-or-eight minute version of an episode. The network looks at it and — if you’re lucky — says, ‘We may want to tweak it, but it’s interesting, it’s lively and it’s our brand.’ Of course, ‘tweaking’ means different things to different people.” 2C Media once proposed a show about single mothers to the WE Network, which “tweaked” it into A Stand Up Mother, a show about comedienne Tammy Pescatelli.

The reality-show component of the Sloans’ business will only grow, Chris says.

“Miami is already the third-biggest market in the country for reality-show production, after Los Angeles and New York,” he notes. “A lot of shows come through here because it’s a great shooting location. Jersey Shore, Top Chef, Hogan Knows Be st and the Kardashians, they’ve all come through here. So a lot of great production crews have developed here.

“You’ve got a lot of people shooting reality shows here. But we’re the only ones writing, shooting and editing here. We’re the only ones keeping it here. And why wouldn’t we? There’s great talent here, great weather, and the place is rife with characters. You read Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry and Edna Buchanan and you can hardly help stumbling over ideas for reality shows.”