Escape Studios is best known as a leading training facility for visual effects artists, modellers and animators -- but the company has also taken the knowledge it’s acquired by creating a network of up to 100 users running high-end 3D tools from Maya to Nuke and sharing assets to build a business that offers solutions similar to its own to post-production companies large and small.
Escape’s business has grown organically since it was set up in 2002 as a ‘finishing school’ for 3D animators and VFX artists graduating from university, taking their raw talent and preparing them for the industry. It now offers training from its base in Shepherd’s Bush, e-learning courses from its website, and tailored on-site sessions for clients looking to gain skills for a particular project.
The firm’s relationship with leading post-houses led it take to the regular informal recommendations of talented creatives who had completed its courses, and turn them into a successful recruitment business. It also took what it had learned from the high demands of its own environment to create a ‘Technology Store’ offering hardware, software and support to post production houses and universities.
Key to what Escape Studios offers here is that the products it sells have been tried and tested in-house.
“We sell what we train on and train on what we sell,” says Escape Studios commercial director Mark Cass. “Customers like to be able to come here and see what we offer working ‘in situ’ as part of their evaluation.”
One example of this is the Isilon IQ X-Series storage platform, which provides the students with fast access to project files. These files include high-definition video, massive textures and huge renders, so it’s important that each has fast access to – and that one student’s bandwidth use doesn’t hamper another’s.
The Isilon IQ X-Series is a clustered storage architecture focussed on high-bandwidth environments where individual X-Series devices appear on the network as a single device for simple management, but guarantee individual users a set level of bandwidth.
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