Image source.
Real Business went on tour in the first week of February as part of a preview of the UKTI’s upcoming GREAT Festival of Creativity in Shanghai which takes place in March to showcase Britain’s innovative edge to China.
Read more on what we discovered from the event preview here:
- What UK SMEs can learn from Jaguar Land Rover’s business strategy
- Britain’s advantage in China lies in its heritage
- Taking 500 creative British companies to the ravenous Chinese
While on the road, one of our stops included visiting prime minister David Cameron’s residence, 10 Downing Street, before moving on to the Soho office of Oscar-winning visual effects studio Framestore.
Upon arrival at number 10, we were greeted by GREAT Britain campaign director Conrad Bird, who detailed the breadth of the scheme which runs across 17 government departments, inspiring the world to think and feel differently about visits and investments into the UK.
Bird highlighted James Bond as an example of British creativity and indeed the wider national film industry, as the recent Paddington movie became the highest-grossing independent UK film of 2014 with 34m.
Image source.
With the film industry in mind, the next visit on the trip was to the office of Framestore the creative studio that won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for its work on sci-fi film Gravity, which starred Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.
Not bad for a UK firm that started with four people in 1986.
The company has achieved enormous growth, with more than 1,000 employees globally in London, Montreal, LA and New York offices, supporting developments in film, TV, virtual reality and, really, any creative technologies the company can get its hands on.
If ever there was a case of running before you can walk, Framestore is it. The company has worked on countless productions including Harry Potter, Guardians of the Galaxy and, of course, Paddington despite not always knowing what it was doing along the way.
A few years ago, I’d have described Framestore as a company that does visual effects for feature films and television. We now have lots of new platforms that we have to provide content for, including exhibitions, real worlds, virtual worlds, installations, image projection for outdoor experiences anywhere that needs a high content image, we’ll work,” co-founder and creative director Mike McGee explained.
Image source.
In the late nineties Jurassic Park had just come out, but there’s only six minutes of actual dinosaurs in that film. Immediately after its release, the BBC approached us to make a series called Walking With Dinosaurs for which we created three hours of film-quality CGI characters. At the time we thought it was impossible, but we agreed to take it on because we enjoy a challenge and we believed that we could find a solution and deliver on budget and on time. We signed the contract without knowing how we were going to achieve the end results, and we did a similar thing with Gravity we agreed to do it and then worked out how.
Walking with Dinosaurs went on to achieve international coverage with Time magazine, be crowned the most-watched documentary on American TV and secured an average viewing audience of 17m in the UK.
They’re impressive accomplishments by anyone’s standards, and even more so when you consider that the team didn’t know how to get the job done at the time of the initial agreement. So do small businesses and startups need to gamble in order to achieve the scale and success of Framestore
Image source.
According to McGee: Some of of biggest successes as a company have come from taking huge risks. Obviously you have to have the talent and the capabilities to do it, but the self-belief and dedication to doing it is the only way as an innovative company that you will succeed taking on those challenges. If you keep being safe then there’s only way you go and that’s not to a good place.
As McGee has mentioned, the company has a raft of projects to deliver for clients across different sectors, and virtual reality is a new one that’s set to be a big area.
He explained: VR is completely immersive storytelling. Once you’re in this environment, the way we communicate stories is very different. It’s not like watching a film, you’re free to look wherever you want, so how do we, as storytellers, hold your attention to steer you through that 360″ environment Well, we’re not sure yet. We’re at year dot and the lessons we’re going to learn will be a steep learning curve with this revolutionary technology.
He wasn’t exaggerating about the learning curve, revealing that the some VR experiences on the market have been found to cause some users to fall over, vomit and get upset. There is a whole new set of rules,” McGee added.
But how does a company set out to overcome obstacles like new technology and client requests while upholding its reputation in the process Skills lots of them.
Image source.
“We have to design and think of ways to solve problems. At Framestore we employ a huge range of people including physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, putting them in teams with animators, fine artists and graphic designers, as well as writers and storytellers. It’s this mix of skills, creativity and science that come together to make Framestore unique in the stories it tells,” McGee revealed.
He continued: It’s difficult to find the right staff. Not only do you have to have creative skill and technical skill in the same person, that’s hard enough, but you also need a really good communicator getting all three of those things in a person is a challenge.
I did a talk at an educational conference a few weeks ago, and as an exercise I took one shot of Sandra Bullock from Gravity and listed the number of people involved in it 40. Next to it I listed all the degrees they had and there were about 12 types including archaeology, anthropology, medicine, chemistry, physics, maths, media, English, history and art. Ultimately, where we find the skills come from very different sources, but they combine those three things: technical, creative and communication.
Framestore, seemingly well aware of its humble origins, has given back to budding creatives and entrepreneurs who are in a situation McGee once was. We actually invested in Bournemouth University to put a Framestore within it. It’s complete with equipment, setting students real projects so that when they’ve finished degrees, they can go to a post-grad place and have a real showreel with real work,” he said.
At the same time, they’re being trained by our people with skills that they’ll need. Once they’re here, we encourage people to play with technology and be innovative in their thinking, but we encourage people to make things we also give life drawing classes, sculpting classes to keep traditional skills up as well. A computer is only a tool at the end of the day.
