New home, new data centre solution. UNIT starts its next chapter in style

UNIT, the leading boutique, short-form and long-form, independent studio, has quite a history. Having been a strong presence in Soho for more than 18 years, it’s a company that’s been fantastic at adapting to what’s going on in the industry. Having recently moved to a new 8-storey townhouse in Fitzrovia with the help of Escape’s own technical team, UNIT Studios Co-Founder Adam Luckwell, is happy to talk about where UNIT’s been, but particularly where it’s going.

“UNIT actually started life as an offline facility,” he smiles, “we were the first to use Final Cut as a professional tool. But offering exclusively offline changed very quickly and we moved into the high-end commercials market, with Flame, Baselight, a 3D studio and motion design department. We then got involved in VFX for Film, and got a BAFTA nomination for the first work we did. And more recently we’ve expanded into Picture Post. We have a talented team that has joined us from Technicolor, including Kevin Horsewood and Simon Giblin, both of whom have done some incredible work".

The move to its latest facility gave UNIT and the Escape team the opportunity to design the space around what Adam calls ‘the brave new world we live in’, one in which people expect a hybrid working model. As a result, the townhouse has a lot more grading space than it does studio space, with its 3D and 2D artists working from places such as New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, and perhaps the less-glamorous sounding Bristol, Sheffield and Wales.

Making the move to our data-centre solution

The new setup needed to support what the artists wanted, while still being collaborative and enabling them to push around vast quantities of data. Escape Technology has worked with UNIT for more than a decade. Having supported it through its on-prem to on-prem facility moves, it was time for UNIT to make the move to our data centre solution.

Adam expands: “Escape is a technology partner and has been instrumental in things like speccing our VFX machines and our pixstor (which is our main storage solution). In the old building we had several issues, number one being that we’d expanded so much, particularly in longform VFX, that we ran out of electricity and rack space! We didn’t want to turn down any work obviously, so we needed a solution that would let us scale up or down as projects required, and that’s data-centre territory.”

Head of 3D and VFX Supervisor Nuno Pereira takes up the story.

“We used to have our own data center and render farm in the building. But because we wanted to honour the way our artists wanted to work, we needed to change how we managed data.” The recent move was the perfect time to go all-in on a change.”

The Escape Technology technical team were instrumental in not only planning the move, but physically carrying out the work, and being available for support if any issues came to light. This was particularly important for UNIT, whose teams needed to hit the ground running on the Monday following the weekend move. Maitland Buchanan, Head of Engineering at UNIT said, “I can’t speak highly enough of your team, who took the stress out of the weekend. We felt in very safe hands.”

Nuno continues with the praise for the new set up delivered by the Escape team: “Flame machines, artist workstations, our entire GPU render farm, CPU renders – everything is now sent to the data center,” confirms Nuno. “It’s working flawlessly and incredibly fast. People are working with us all around the world, and they’re connecting in the same way they always have. I don’t think our artists even know the render farm isn’t in the building any more!”

Hear more from Adam and Nuno about the benefits of our data centre below.

If you're facing challenges similar to UNIT Studios and need a scalable, secure, and flexible data solution to meet the demands of modern VFX or post-production workflows, reach out to us at sales@escape-technology.com or call 020 7734 8809 to discuss how we can help.