AI VFX tech company Electric Sheep,has been awarded Innovate UK’s Smart Grant for a £500k project, to support the development of Spotlight, its technology to assist in the mundane yet essential prep work of VFX, allowing artists to focus on creative visual storytelling.
Spotlight is used for rotoscoping, a technique that involves digitally tracing over footage to isolate live-action elements or characters for seamless integration into VFX environments, enhancing films and TV with dynamic visuals and allowing for more impactful storytelling.
Currently, this process is incredibly time-consuming. It can take days – if not weeks – to manually rotoscope a single shot, especially when dealing with complex scenes. A significant portion of the UK’s VFX rotoscoping work is currently outsourced overseas as it’s more cost-efficient, but this still comes with operational overheads and long delays.
Innovate UK, the UK government’s innovation agency, awards Smart Grants to UK companies providing the “best game changing and world leading ideas”. This highly sought after funding is offered to only 2% of applicants across multiple sectors.
According to Mark Maltby, CTO of The Look London, the post-house responsible for Sex Education, Gangs of London and Fleabag, Spotlight has been a game changer.
“If the shots have too much rotoscoping, it often doesn’t make economical sense for us to complete them. As creatives, we appreciate anything that helps us to keep as much work in house as possible. Electric Sheep’s solution offers an economical and time-efficient way of preparing shots so that we can take on more work and continue to deliver a premium service for our clients.”
Currently VFX artists annotate clips with their requirements for overseas vendors. With the same annotation information, Spotlight can identify and track what is to be rotoscoped and return it in minutes, rather than days. It does this with tools such as an AI paintbrush that’ll detect the nearest edge, even with a rough paint.
“We want to make rotoscoping so easy that VFX artists can have their shots ready in a few clicks,” says Richie Murray, co-founder of Electric Sheep. “We’re so pleased the UK government shares our vision for innovation in the creative industry. Rotoscoping is one of many time consuming and repetitive tasks faced by artists that gets in the way of creativity. We’re focusing on the tedious parts of the job, so artists can focus on telling spectacular stories.”
The UK is a leading destination for film and TV visual effects from Hollywood and beyond. Now, innovative British technology promises to disrupt traditional media production workflows, offering VFX artists a new, more efficient way of working and preventing them from needing to outsource overseas.
Electric Sheep is using the funding to build Spotlight V3, its most advanced and fastest rotoscoping tool to date. V3, launching early next year, promises to enhance the video segmentation process for VFX and beyond.
UK-registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £25m of Government money for R&D that can significantly impact the UK economy. This year the bi-annual scheme, run by Innovate UK Business Connect, attracted almost 2,000 applications. Only 46 companies were chosen to receive development funding.
In its assessment of Electric Sheep’s bid, Innovate UK said, “[Spotlight] offered significant benefits to the VFX/movie industries”
Pippa Considine
Share this story
