About Mission Digital
Mission Digital is a digital imaging, video playback and digital dailies service provider to the film and TV industry, with offices in Cardiff and London. A digital dailies lab is the modern equivalent of an original film processing laboratory. It turns video data (raw film material or rushes) into what’s needed next in the production pipeline. Mission also looks after data preservation through archiving and copying.
Visual effects scenes require special files that give a high quality version of the images and contain metadata. We’re often responsible for locating, processing and delivering these files and sending them to the correct VFX company. Since there is often a need to go to the archived original camera negative (OCN), we call this ‘pulling from archive’, or ‘VFX pulls’ for short.
Our manual VFX pulls process was very time and labour intensive
We’d had an idea that involved overhauling the status quo of this manual process, but didn’t have the funding to do it. When we heard about Clwstwr, we shared our idea in an application for funding. We wanted to automate the VFX pulls process by creating an easy to use platform that allows remote editors to action VFX pulls and send required footage to their VFX post-production houses. We could see the possibility to make the process automated, skipping the middle steps and avoiding unnecessary back and forth, eventually making the process faster, easier, more reliable and secure.
There was, and is, one product on the market that covers a similar area to our idea
However, we weren’t concerned. The other product can do some similar things to what we eventually built, but there are several USPs to our version. One of them is that the cost is so much lower because it's been developed lean. Mission has an 80:20 ethos, where we aim to deliver 80% with 20% of costs, so we were very much following that.
We see our product as being one module within a larger product that we could develop in the future. It offers a great deal of flexibility, being able to be fully deployed either on the Cloud or run on on-premises infrastructure. We also built automation into the way the product deploys in the Cloud, something that isn’t currently offered by anyone else.
Software development is incredibly expensive
We received around £50k in funding from Clwstwr, which we match-funded. We then continued to invest in development after the Clwstwr goals were met. We hoped it’d be enough to get a working prototype that we could use to strengthen the opinions around our project - now named Origami - and result in further development work. The funding took the sting out of the essential initial setup and demonstrated that there was a reason to keep funding the project.
A big chunk of the Clwstwr funding went towards paying for skills
We really needed a Full Stack Developer to start the build of Origami’s first module, ‘Phoenix’, with our technical lead, Gary. Together, they’d essentially form a software department within Mission. After much searching, we hired a talented Full Stack Developer named Joe, who was crucial in getting Origami Phoenix off the ground. He knew how to use the tech stack we wanted to work in and was responsible for setting up the scaffold for building the project and implementing testing procedures. There were individual bits of equipment that we needed as well, so those costs were also factored in alongside the equipment and resources that Mission had invested in prior to the project.
Most of the work took place within this new software department
First, they broke down the proposed application into several small pieces called microservices that could be selected or deselected by editors, depending on what they needed. Building these microservices was in line with our plans to eventually scale up; they futureproof the product. We developed the microservices, then built a front-end website for Origami Phoenix with an interface that users could easily navigate and use. From there, we just kept iterating both sides, designing the features that we needed and tweaking them until we had our minimum viable product.
Having an MVP for Origami as a result of Clwstwr enabled us to prove our concept
We've continued to develop the MVP, with the help of lots of user feedback. We had some valuable responses from post-production supervisors about what they felt the existing product on the market was missing. We've added a lot more features for things that were ‘must haves’ - things we didn't actually know about before we started the project. We also realised that we needed to spruce up the front end before putting it in front of potential clients, which we worked on, and we've solidified the error handling and resilience of the product. We also accelerated our support for 100% Cloud hosted services.
We’re now looking for our first Origami users
Our industry is so project-based that it might take several months before a user is ready to take on a new project that they can try Origami out on. With high stakes and short deadlines, it’s always a challenge to convince someone to be the first guinea pig, though we’re confident we’ll pass this hurdle and see a snowball in growth. We're in a place now where we’re about to launch publicly with a marketing campaign including a website, hard material, attendance at industry expos and articles in trade magazines talking about the new service.
We have long term plans for Origami
We built Origami as a platform that will host several apps/tools, the first one being Phoenix for VFX pulls. From here, we’ll build out the platform to offer tools that solve problems across different parts of the production pipeline that would benefit from automation. Origami will eventually be a one-stop service where users can select the apps or tools that they want. A technical example of it would be something like AWS; it has separate services that you can use together or individually. A less technical example would be how when you book a flight through an airline, you can choose to add on accommodation, a hire car and so on. You'll be able to opt in, and often the sum of the parts is worth more than them individually.
Having Clwstwr funding to get to this stage has been genuinely life-changing
It allowed us to branch out into new areas and achieve something that we wanted to do for such a long time. Off the back of that, we’ve built a software department and have such exciting plans for the future. It's more than just the money; having the mentors with relevant expertise and the rest of the Clwstwr team to call upon for advice kept us focused and on track. We couldn’t have arrived here without Clwstwr and we’re so excited to reinvest in Wales as we grow our software and service offerings in the future. We hope to create new jobs as we search for new talent, and to use Origami to supplement the work we’re doing in the Welsh industry and further afield.