Gez Hixson promoted to head of production and Bournmouth, U.K.-based visual effects house.
BOURNEMOUTH, U.K. – Outpost VFX has announced that Paul Francis has joined the team as CTO and that the facility is expanding in Q4 2016 to double their capacity with vastly increased render and storage capacity. Paul has over 20 years of technical experience in the media industry, most recently in medical grade virtual reality applications for use in cutting-edge medical trials. He will be bringing all his experience together under one hat as CTO. Paul’s first task was to successfully navigate Outpost VFX through the MPAA Auditors accreditation for Universal, ensuring that our security and VFX process is world class.
“We are all very happy that Paul has joined Outpost VFX, his experience and knowledge will be invaluable as the company continues to expand,” commented Outpost VFX CEO Duncan McWilliam. “He will be taking us forward in developing our GPU render pipeline, data lab and further expansion to 30 more workstations bringing us to 80 available workstations in the next three months.”
“As CTO I’m required to oversee and maintain all of the IT infrastructure and am also responsible for researching future technologies that can improve on our already spectacular CPU / GPU render farms, distributed rendering, and software solutions that keep our hugely talented team of artists working as efficiently as possible, and ultimately keep us competitive,” said Francis. “There are of course many other reactive parts to this job, which means no two days are ever the same.”
As well as this new appointment and the company expansion, Gez Hixson has been promoted to head of production as Outpost increases their film slate to include work with Sony and Universal as well as another Weinstein (TWC) project plus increased capacity in production for commercials.
In the past year the studio has worked on numerous film and commercial projects, including Jason Bourne (Universal), Nocturnal Animals (Universal), My Beautiful Broken Brain (Netflix), In The Deep, Under the Shadow (Wigwam Films), iBoy (Wigwam Films) and is currently providing VFX on Salty (Salty Films), Final Score (Signature Entertainment) and Interlude in Prague (Stillking Films).
Source: Outpost VFX
