Shots - July 2015
More
and more Flame artists and VFX supervisors are choosing to become
masters of their destiny by opening specialist shops, but will the
success of the little guys mean they’ll get too big for their
boutiques? Adrian Pennington speaks
to the heads of several bijou studios to find out how big ambitions
and small budgets are changing the market.
Small
groups of entrepreneurial talent have been going independent for as
long as there have been larger facilities for them to splinter from.
Green shoots are, after all, vital for the regeneration of this
business. But what’s noticeable about the recent trend in start-ups
is the sheer number that have launched and thrived in today’s
incredibly competitive market.
Most
of these new businesses are happy to be classified as boutique, where
the term refers both to size and a culture of personal service that’s
apparently at odds with the factory mentality
of giant operations.
“Boutique
is an attitude. It means more than one-size-fits-all,” says Paul
Simpson, who pioneered the boutique movement with Realise Studio in
1999. “It’s really about running jobs from an artist-led, rather
than a production or accounts, perspective.”
Derek
Moore describes Coffee & TV, which he co-founded, as a “hippy
commune”, adding “We support each other through successes and
disappointments with a unified feeling you don’t get in a large
facility.”
Will
Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Milk, speaks for many when he notes,
“We’re not listed on the stock market with a duty to return a
dividend to investors. We still get everyone around the table and let
them know the P&L of the business and where we are going with
it.”
Scott
Griffin, nineteentwenty’s MD, says he wants to inculcate “a small
company feel but not a small company reputation”; while the
essential
appeal
of a boutique for Neon co-founder Tom Bridges, is “the palpable
sense of enthusiasm, of collaboration, which our clients seem to
enjoy. It’s not impossible to recreate this in larger facilities,
but I think it’s exponentially more difficult.”
At
a large company with more work and people to juggle, it’s not
uncommon for a VFX producer to be looking after 10 jobs at a time,
which means they’re being spread rather thinly.
“Jobs
will often be shoe-horned in, last minute changes to existing jobs
have to be accommodated, artists are being pulled off one job to
finish another or to be sent on a shoot,” notes Chris Allen,
executive producer at CherryCherry. A boutique operates on a
different scale. “We can respond to client requests immediately.
When you call us, it will often be me that answers the phone,” says
Allen.
Hani
AlYousif, VFX supervisor and founder of Filament, makes a similar
point. “A producer and director don’t want to spend half an hour
of their booking time waiting in reception. They know they can reach
me. They know they can always get in when they want and that I will
personally do the job.”
‘Boutique’
signifies a place that’s run a little leaner, is able to adapt a
little quicker and offers an open architecture for different types of
creative to gather in one space.
“It’s
not just who you are but who you say you are,” says Jason Mayo,
partner at New York’s Click 3X. “When companies say they are
boutique they want to present a little bit of a
personality
or atmosphere for a client to make them feel more comfortable.”
Artists
with itchy feet will always seek to break out on their own, but the
cost of doing so has previously been too high without venture capital
backing. The shift from bespoke to off-the-shelf computing gear and
from film to digital as an origination/distribution medium, has
altered
the
picture dramatically.
“When I was a colourist, the badge on the
kit
really
mattered,” observes Gary Szabo, MD of Smoke & Mirrors. “Now
clients genuinely don’t care. They want delivery on time and on
budget and above creative expectations.”
In
1995 a Flame cost a million pounds. Even three years ago you needed
£200k, putting it beyond the reach of most wannabe owner- operators.
In 2000, £270k would get you 240TB of storage, which today can be
picked up for about £25k. Back then you would get little change from
£1.5m if you wanted a telecine machine. Now grading software like Da
Vinci is given away free.
Where
hero hardware was once lauded above the operator, the industry now
genuinely claims to prize the talent behind the machine.
AlYousif
believes the catalyst for this was
the introduction of Smoke on a
Mac in 2010. He bought two of them, sublet rooms in Soho and was off
and running with a handful of loyal clients. After investing £90k in
a Flame, Filament had to ramp up to beat MPC to the
GoCompare campaign for Fold7 in 2013. “Once you have a Flame
you can scale as much as you like by renting licences for Flare [a
subset of Flame],” he says.
The
democracy of tech is a universal phenomenon – VFX shops across the
globe, from the US to Sydney to Amsterdam, have sprung up almost
overnight. “You don’t need huge render farms on site,” says
Simpson. “By plugging into the cloud you can scale to take on as
much work as the bigger places.”
Kit
costs are never this simple, of course. As Coffee & TV’s Moore
observes, “The minute you have two people working on shared data
you need shared infrastructure, which needs to be maintained and
operate securely.”
Aside
from the opportunities afforded by lower- cost gear, many founding
fathers (VFX remains a male domain) also cite the bureaucratic
hurdles in facility supermarkets as a reason to up sticks. Simon
Wilkinson, managing director of The Flying Colour Company, recalls
such frustrations at a former employer: “It took 35 business plans
just
to sign-off buying a Baselight. I missed
the dynamism and diversity
of being at the front of the creative process.”
Gripes
like these may strike a chord with anyone seeking greater career
control. “At a large outfit you’re just a number on a
spreadsheet,” says AlYousif. “Now that I run the sales and admin
side I don’t have to worry about an operating group outside the UK
deciding to restructure my job.”
Bridges
launched Neon as a reaction against financial targets and internal
politics. “I wanted to focus on the work – and have that be the
yardstick by which we get measured, rather than how much we spend on
client lunches,” he says. “We make an expensive, highly bespoke,
product. To me it’s madness to apply high volume, double-glazing-
style sales techniques to that.” Neon is able to invest in R&D
projects (such as pushing the technique of photogrammetry for short
film Macro),
“which no investor would have countenanced”.
An
oft-quoted complaint from those formerly at big facilities is that
the star artist will attend meetings to win the work but during the
course of post will get shunted to another project.
“The
client will get moved to the ‘B’ team or whoever happens to be
free to work,” says Moore. “That has to happen to keep the
machine running, but it means clients can feel lost.”
The
more experienced an artist, the more likely they are to
make a career move that will allow them to trade on their name.
Setting up your own studio can be as much a lifestyle choice as it is
about earning more of the pie. As Milk’s Cohen puts it: “Many
have fantasized about the nirvana of owning their own place where
everyone walks on pink fluffy carpets. We got our opportunity [when
The Mill shuttered its TV programming VFX division] and now we have a
responsibility to make it work.”
Aspiring
to be a master of one’s own destiny is often just pub talk, but the
recession may ironically have spurred more folk to walk the talk and
actually walk out on their job security.
“Lots
of people were doing crazy stuff for very little money just to keep
money coming through the door,” says Moore. “When we came out of
recession, budgets never went back up. That meant people found it
hard to hit the margins, leading to a lot of the most talented staff
feeling a bit disenfranchised and thinking they can do it better.
What’s happened is a perfect storm of budgets dropping and
technology becoming more affordable, allowing the best artists to
prove to
themselves
whether they can do it better or not.” Griffin admits he was one of
those, co-founding nineteentwenty in November 2013 “to try and
produce the best VFX for high-end commercials, but more
economically.”
With
the boutique genie out of the bottle the post production model has
arguably changed forever. “More and more clients prefer the same
great quality of work but with the more personalised service you get
at a smaller place,” says Allen.
While
some clients opt to route work through large facilities with whom
agencies run bulk accounts, directors may stick to their guns for the
choice of working with select talent wherever they may be [see box
Big or boutique? below]. This is often the case if directors
feel backed into working for an agency’s own ‘boutique’, such
as WPP’s Gramercy and Publicis’ Prodigious.
“The
market has worked in favour of dynamic businesses that can wrap their
arms around production companies rather than simply supply them,”
says Wilkinson.
None
of this is to denigrate the work or reputation of international
powerhouses like Framestore, MPC and The Mill. Most ex-employee-
turned-facility-chiefs acknowledge the debt that they owe to their
alma mater and the crucial role that these enterprise-class
facilities can play in leading the market.
“MPC
has a depth of creative talent not available in smaller studios,”
says MPC Advertising’s global MD Graham Bird. “We offer more
specialist talent in terms of digital intermediate – lighting,
animation and world-class colour grading. The ability to deliver a
project creatively from start to finish incorporating colour grading
is a huge advantage.”
By
definition, boutiques can’t offer that breadth of service, but
being bijou shouldn’t lead to the misconception that they can’t
take on volume.
“Boutique
implies we’re not capable of the big stuff – and that’s not
true,” says Moore, who’s not a fan of the term. “We won a very
large-scale international campaign [H&M through Strange Cargo]
because the client trusted us and wasn’t worried about our
notionally smaller footprint.”
Allen
agrees. “Smaller companies are just as capable of taking on
creatively heavy VFX jobs. The difference being we just can’t take
on as many of them simultaneously.”
In
a saturated market often the greatest challenge for a start-up is
finding and winning the work. “Loyal clients have stood by us and
we can be competitive in terms of cost,” says Griffin. “We’ve
been very careful to turn down a couple of larger jobs because at the
time we felt we weren’t able to do them justice. An important part
of the process is being honest about what you can and can’t do. One
bad job would get around Soho like wildfire.”
Coffee
& TV’s headcount has leapt from just four to 24 in two years.
“Our original goal was to make the business robust. Now our goal is
to prioritise the quality of work we do. We want to ring-fence the
size of the operation, to stay together on one floor, because when
you’re split between floors or buildings it is really difficult to
communicate between teams.”
If
size is part of being ‘boutique’, at what point do successful
boutique brands lose that feeling – or what strategies can they
employ to retain it?
“Someone
once told me that after reaching around 20 people you need to start
putting a lock on the stationery cupboard,” says Bridges. “That’s
the point at which you start needing a layer of middle management,
when going into work becomes just another job, when people can stop
caring as much, and when financial priorities will
likely
become more important than artistic ones. It’s not a hard-and-fast
rule, of course, but I think there’s probably something to it.”
According
to Allen, there’s a tipping point where a house goes from being a
boutique to a beast. “Which is great, but of course some beasts
need constant feeding.”
With
growth comes greater financial pressure to meet the monthly payroll.
As Allen observes, “The growth of a post house is very much
exponential – doubling in size doesn’t necessarily mean your
profit will.”
Milk
began in 2013 as a largish boutique with 40 people. Now, having just
opened a studio in Cardiff, the headcount is 120 – and rising.
“We
were very vocal about not wanting to be big and that’s still the
case,” says Cohen. “If you open somewhere else with 20 or 30
people you can very much replicate the culture you have in your main
office rather than growing to 300 people at your main site.”
Opening
small satellite companies seems to be the way many boutiques envision
future growth. Coffee & TV and nineteentwenty staff London
offices backed by a Bristol base. With studios in London and
Istanbul, and plans to open another location soon, CherryCherry’s
Allen says “You could call us a global boutique.”
In
January, MPC opened a studio in Paris, far smaller than its LA and
New York operations but along similar lines to its homes in Amsterdam
and Mexico. Bird calls this “boutique studio within a network”
unique and a way of keeping ambitious talent within the family.
“We
help [talent] to realise their ambition by setting up a new
business,” says Bird. “The studios have a boutique feel but they
don’t have the limitations one might associate with some standalone
studios since they are fully connected to MPC’s wider resources.”
Billing
itself as the original boutique, the 20-year-old Smoke & Mirrors
has seen its business treble in size in the last four years with a
£19m+ turnover and a staff of 250.
“We’ve
had to focus on not losing that boutique feel while overseeing a
period of terrific growth,” says Szabo. “We have to manage growth
to retain the personality of the company.”
That
includes last year’s relocation to a new five-floor Poland Street
home. “We’re breaking out of boutique and into the big league,
but we’ve got to make sure our clients have that boutique feel –
the commitment you give to their projects.”
Big
or boutique? The directors’ perspective
“Directors
want to surround themselves with a team they can trust and if the
relationship you have with an artist is a good one then the size of
the house is irrelevant,” says David Rosenbaum, LA-based director
at Humble. “However, with budgets getting smaller it’s becoming
more and more difficult to justify spend on VFX, so there’s
something to be said for smaller facilities because they can usually
match your budget.”
Having
graduated from Digital Domain, Rosenbaum disagrees that the culture
of giant
VFX
shops is necessarily corporate. “Nevertheless, if you choose a big
house there is a higher chance you may not be getting their ‘A’
team,” he says. “You may get their ‘B’ or ‘C’ team
because other directors or clients take precedence over you.
“Directors
are selfish beasts who want to know we’re the only ones in the room
even though we realise we’re not. Since boutiques don’t have the
structure to support that many jobs there’s an advantage in going
there to get their ‘A’ team all of the time.”
When
director Christopher Riggert started out he was attracted to the best
known brands, but over time his opinion changed.
“I
wasn’t making deep relationships with the people in the
organisation,” he says. “Your sole contact is with one or two
heads of department then you are pushed around internally. I found it
very frustrating because if something starts to go wrong and you are
on a timeline crunch you need direct access to operators. I’ve
subsequently sought more boutique experiences because I want to know
who the operators are. Ultimately
it
comes down to the person making contact with the work and their
commitment to it.”
Repped
by Biscuit Filmworks and based out of LA, Riggert tends to use Rock
Paper Scissors for editing and its sister VFX boutique a52. “I
could still be working on an edit while a52 are blocking out 3D, so
the workflow makes sense. And they know they have some allegiance
from me.” He adds, “I’m not scared to work with people remotely
in [Riggert’s native] Australia from here. We no longer have to be
sitting in the same room.”
The
view from the US
Having
spent more than half its 22 years as a boutique, New York’s Click
3X has broadened into a creative digital studio and design company
with around 70 staff. Partner Jason Mayo says its recent planned
expansion is part of a macro trend in the US away from smaller shops.
“There’s
a move toward places that can do everything in one package,” he
explains.
“Those
with smaller places might be able to handle specific jobs for less
money, but they can’t offer all the things a client might want.”
He
thinks the trend toward specialisms in VFX, graphics or editing may
be reversing because deliverables are changing. “Outside of the
TVC, clients want rich media content for digital ads, or pre-rolls, a
Facebook game, versions of video for YouTube,
Instagram
and Vine. People are trying to get twice the work done for the same
amount of money and with fewer people it’s almost impossible to
manage.”
While
production companies are adding graphics and VFX arms or editing
departments, edit boutiques are adding Flame and graphic design.
Click 3X has appointed 10 directors and owns shooting stages as well
as suites
for
VFX, design, grading and digital. “Five years ago it would have
been impossible to take on the size of job we can now,” Mayo says.
“Boutiques
still work because the talent is more diverse and the software
investment is attainable now. But you have to be very committed to a
specialism and be selective in your work rather taking everything on
at the same time.”
