Spider Eye
Spider Eye is an animation company, providing 2D traditional, digital and 3D animation for TV and film.
Set up by Morgan Francis in 1998, the company was originally based in Oxford Circus and relocated to St Just in 2001.
Producer Erica Darby says: “We moved here for the lifestyle advantages and for the inspirational setting. It has coincided with the arrival of broadband in Cornwall, which has made it feasible to run our business from here. Prior to broadband, we were totally dependent on couriers.”
However, Spider Eye is heavily constrained by the bandwidth currently available.
“The ADSL broadband connection we can achieve here in St Just is 8 Mb download and 0.5 Mb upload. That is simply not fast enough for us to be able to operate as effectively as we would like. Obviously, the limited upload speeds are a major disadvantage for us. It ties us up and wastes our time, when we could otherwise be more productive.
“We are looking into leased line alternatives but they are prohibitively expensive. We have been quoted nearly £100,000 a year for a line bearing the kinds of speeds we would ideally want.
“What’s more, SDSL which would offer higher upload speeds is not available at the St Just exchange!
“To give an illustration of how we are hampered by the slow upload speeds, we sometimes have to send across commercials frame by frame. To send the frames for a 30 second commercial through by broadband will take us twelve hours! Last week, we had someone sitting up right through the night making sure a commercial was sent through correctly.
“Our main competitors tend to be based in Soho in London where, there is a high bandwidth network that has been established purely to serve the film industry there, Soho Net. So the businesses based in Soho have a huge advantage over us.
“We need Next Generation Access in Cornwall to help us compete on a level playing field with others in our industry and to help build Cornwall as a centre of excellence in film and animation. There are many animators who would love to move to Cornwall, if the infrastructure were here to support them.
“Transmitting film and animation to clients is not the only reason we need high speed broadband. Many of the people who work as sub-contractors in this industry, such as writers, artists and storyboarders, all work from home. They also need to be able to send their work though speedily and efficiently.
“We have just won a multi-million pound contract with Playhouse Disney, which is very exciting for us as it is our first break into creating our own productions, instead of providing a service to others.
Called ‘Jungle Junction’ it will mean producing 52 x 11 minute episodes. We would love to be able to produce it all in Cornwall but at present we believe we will need to expand our studio in Cornwall but also set up a further studio in Soho in order to meet the requirements, largely due to limitations of bandwidth in Cornwall.
“ There are 28 approval stages for each episode, and the work will need to be approved by people in London, New York and Hollywood. And, of course, once we send through rushes for approval, there will inevitably be comments and then the revised version needs to be sent again too. So, what with all the different versions, voice records and so on, we are into literally thousands of transmissions of large files, usually under severe time pressure due to deadlines.
“ Right now, we are not geared up to be able to deliver a project of this size solely from a base in Cornwall. If there were a Next Generation Access fibre optic infrastructure in place, able to deliver symmetric high bandwidth at an affordable price, it would transform what we would be able to do in Cornwall, acting as a magnet to others working in our industry.”
