Five minutes with Untold Studios

The last time we spoke with Untold Studios, a VES Award-winning, BAFTA, Grammy and EMMY-nominated studio, it was in the midst of Covid lockdowns and, like everyone else, the full-service creative studio was unsure how the future would pan out. Unlike many of its peers, however, Untold Studios was primed to pivot to remote work since it was founded in 2018 on full-scale cloud infrastructure and a belief in the primacy of virtualised workflows streamed securely from AWS.

To say the company has gone from strength to strength would be an understatement. From a handful of employees on startup in London it now boasts over 300 permanent staff, opened studios in Los Angeles, Mumbai and Bangalore and expanded from predominantly doing commercials into long-form work on films including Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Sonic 3 and working with A list directors like Taika Waititi and into episodic The Sandman (Netflix); The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Sky); Ted Lasso (AppleTV+); Avatar: The Last Airbender (Netflix); The Boys S4 (Amazon Prime); Rings of Power (Amazon Prime); Knuckles (Paramount+) and The Crown S3, S4, S5 (Netflix).

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Director of Technology Sam Reid was right there at the beginning and says, “It’s mind-blowing to see the studio grow from being the tiny ten-person outfit we were to what we are today. When we started, it was just me in terms of technology and now I've got a team of 20 people.”

As a full-service creative studio Untold have teams expert in every aspect of production from conception to final picture. “Our world-class visual effects team create and polish fantastic CG. We also have a specialist music team working with artists like Billie Eilish, Adele, Sam Smith, Kylie Minogue, Imagine Dragons and Rita Ora. Our range of projects goes from the quick turnarounds of music videos at one extreme to advertising campaigns which generally last about four to six weeks per project to more long form projects which could last years.”

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To what extent would you attribute the successful growth to the original cloud-based technology vision?

The main thing is that expansion and project growth becomes an operating expenditure. We started the studio with some investment and we chose to use that investment to attract really great talent to the studio, which we knew would bring in good work.

We decided to keep the technology as an Opex so that we could spend it when we need it and not waste money on infrastructure we’re not using.  In our first year we took on 100 VFX shots for The Crown S3 on Netflix which was a huge project for such a new studio. There’s no way we could have done that if we were purchasing equipment. Since then, we've essentially gone through quite a tumultuous period in terms of Covid and the Ukraine war which impacts the supply chain, but we were in the fortunate position where we didn’t have to wait on delivery of physical compute.

Since we partner with Amazon Web Services, one of the biggest businesses in the world, it clearly has a much bigger sway in acquiring technology than Untold Studios will ever do. The fact is we can rely on them to buy the equipment and rent it off them. That’s a great way to grow the business.

Equipment is not something we have to think about. That sounds crazy coming from a director of technology but I've been in businesses where you constantly question whether you have enough capacity to render a job or sufficient workstations available in order to complete a project.

At Untold Studios, no one has ever asked me if we have enough computers or storage to do something because the answer is always, ‘Yes’. There was no question whether we had the render power to do the Sonic spin-off Knuckles because of course we do. We can just tune up and tune down when we need to.

Since we don't have to worry about that side of the business it means our artists can express themselves creatively with no restraints. That’s what makes the work that we see coming out of Untold so great.

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Since you work with virtual tools where possible, switching to Virtual ClearView Flex seems a logical choice.

ClearView Flex, the video collaboration software is great and we had three units but I told Sohonet a few years back that it needs to be virtualised because we don't want to own any hardware. We don't really want it sat in our studio because ideally, we want to be able to use ClearView whenever we want for whatever show needs it. Physical units are restrictive.

So, virtualising ClearView is the first step in that direction. I think there are some still some things to work through in terms of licensing, the next step is for us to be able to just spin up ClearView's whenever we want them and just be billed for them. If we can get to that point, then it’s power and utility really is unlocked.

Has your use of ClearView changed?

I’d say it has expanded along with our business. It's a tool that we use in almost every aspect of every project, when we’re showcasing work to our clients and directors. It’s not for any kind of unique situations.

You know, it's such a strange landscape now. We went from pre-Covid where every review was physical and in the studio to one hundred percent remote and when we emerged the other side we just continued. Some members of the agency might be in the studio, some might be remote or the director might be in the studio and the agency is remote. In every situation we use ClearView. For instance, one of our colourists lives in Oslo so he is a hundred per cent remote. The rarest scenario is that everyone is in the studio and we don't use ClearView.

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How easy is Virtual Flex to install and use?

As part of the expansion of our LA team we introduced some visual effects workflows into the LA studio and I got one of the lead technologists on my team in London to install a virtualised ClearView from Oregon for the LA studio. He was able to do all of that remotely without having to jump on a plane.

That fits right in with our philosophy. We built that whole LA studio from London. We didn't fly anyone to the West Coast to build the technology infrastructure so it makes complete sense that ClearView should slot into that as well. It really is a key tool for us.

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Tell us about a recent project

A really fun one we delivered is a spot for Virgin Media for which we won Gold in Animation at Ciclope. It's a CG walrus on a motorboat and was a really fun campaign to do to create and animate the character with a high level of realism. It just shows what you can do if the artists are just not worried about the technology and they can kind of iterate and unleash their creativity. It’s virtual technology that really does drive the business as opposed to technology being seen as a kind of necessary evil and a money pit.

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