From Entrepreneur to Oscar winner
Entrepreneur Country speaks to Sir William Sargent, Founder of Framestore
A
ll entrepreneurs build companies with the view of global success – few can count an Academy Award as
part of their company’s journey.
Since founding visual effects company Framestore more than 20 years ago with an investment of £40,000, Sir William Sargent has retained the aspiration to turn his four person, Soho- based company into a global industry powerhouse.
Two decades later,
Framestore has grown into a team of more than 600 artists, computer scientists, producers, animators, visualisers, developers and engineers.
Framestore began by creating visual and moving images for all platforms, and first moved into the film industry in 1994 with Lost in Space, starring Gary Oldman and Matt Le Blanc. It works in partnership with its clients, whether they are musicians, film directors, art directors, brand owners, advertising agencies, broadcasters or film studios to create amazing images.
Framestore’s IMDB listing makes for impressive reading and it counts some of the world’s highest grossing movies among its accomplishments. These include Bond films Golden Eye and Quantum of Solace, all of the Harry Potter films, The Dark Knight, Avatar, Lincoln and the Oscar winning The Golden Compass. Framestore’s ambition has always been to be at the cutting edge and at the top end of the genres that they work in, whether this is commercials, music videos, title sequences, digital or film. William
32 entrepreneurcountry Sargent attributes the company’s
success to a mixture of luck and a lot of hard work. “Everybody needs luck to meet the right people, at the right time. It is a mixture of hiring good people, the people being around at the right time and at the right time in the cycle.” The rest, as they say in the movies, is history.
Scale and complexity in the movies Given the complexity of the projects that Framestore works on and the number of stakeholders involved, keeping track of all the variables is a tough job. As a result, not only is technology at the heart of the visual effects it creates, but at the heart of its business operations.
Although many realise that a film requires a lot of people to see it through to the big screen, it is difficult to comprehend the scale of an operation like Avatar, in which visual effects are core to the movie. Film companies will often have two or even three large companies of up to 300 people each working on a title, along with three or four smaller companies. This isn’t just limited to the film industry; as with all businesses, no matter what their size or market, Framestore had to evaluate how best to capture, control and share the amount of information held.
The sheer number of people involved in projects and the sequences and data produced is immense. Although it was not termed big data when Framestore began, this is exactly what it is. The challenge of managing huge volumes of information isn’t new to Framestore
– it has always been necessary to capture everything from camera details to creative effects in a secure, shareable way.
It is simply the case
that technology has advanced over the last 20 years to provide a structured approach to managing it.
This control and structured approach is vital in the visual effects industry. Given the secrecy surrounding films in the lead up to a premier and the potential for leaks to go global almost instantaneously on the Internet, having
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