Hi Matt. How would you describe your business and what it does?

SR Production Services is a production design, consulting and rental business that operates in the live events, film and TV sectors. We solve technical problems for all manner of productions and help translate creative ideas into reality.

How did you find out about the Clwstwr funding?

We were looking into various options to help fund some of our more ‘out there’ R&D and it came up.

What inspired you to apply for funding?

My collaborator Stacia had an idea for an immersive installation that would require some technology that didn’t exist in an accessible form. The project didn’t quite fit into the remit of our regular business activities, so it was necessary to look outside the business to help make it a reality.

Explain what you were aiming to do in your application

There were two main factors driving the application. One was to help create an immersive installation that would be interesting and exciting for audiences to experience. The other was to develop technology that could be used to help create similar experiences in the future, as well as to provide wider utility to the business in other related sectors. We received £30,000 of funding from Clwstwr.

Describe the process you’ve been through since receiving the funding

Roughly speaking, we came into the process with an idea for an installation and a rough concept of how it would work. Within the first few months we developed a proof of concept installation, and it didn’t work at all. Standard R&D stuff!

So, we took a step back and isolated the elements that were getting in the way of success. These were technological hurdles for which no off-the-shelf solution existed. In a nutshell, the hurdles were preventing us from creating a) audience-driven, interactive, low latency playback of video content on a large array of screens and b) an easy way of assigning large arrays of physical inputs to arbitrary software outputs, using a common communication protocol and in an intelligently scalable way

We decided the best approach would be to focus on solving these problems in a way that would give us a general solution that could be applied to many projects, rather than a blinkered approach of solving them only in the context of the installation.

We spent the majority of the rest of the project working on these problems, and ended up with the foundation of two systems that we can now provide as services. We hope in the future that they can become saleable, commercially viable products in their own right.

Finally, we looped back round to where we started and built a second version of the installation, using the technology we had developed and the skills we had learned. This version worked much better and we were able to take it on the road for audiences to experience, most notably to Glastonbury Festival.

What would you say were the main outcomes of the R&D?

The key outcome was definitely the underlying technology we developed. Of particular note is the network video distribution and playback system we made for driving the story content on the screens. We have continued to build on this system and in its current form (now named Thrall Network), it is driving all on-set screens for several high end TV productions, including the latest season of Doctor Who.

The process also helped us learn how to do R&D, which is obvious if you think about it, but the resources, advice and coaching that were available to us were invaluable in formalising what has always been a rather loose process. This has changed our entire approach to creative R&D for the better and will lead to more focus and a higher quality of output.

Where do you think you’ll go next, having carried out the R&D?

It has already changed a fair bit for us, both in terms of our internal processes and the technology and services we are able to offer our clients. Moving forward, we hope to be able to collaborate with more artists in the immersive space and use the knowledge and experience we have gained to help deliver larger and more ambitious installations, locally in Wales and further afield.