One of New York’s latest creative talent collaboration start-ups, Hotspring, has launched a global platform to service the increasing demand of remote VFX talent and to improvise the existing high-cost business model. The main motto behind the launch is to create a place where creative studios can discover and work with top global VFX teams. The users can experience a saving up to 35 per cent on costs and a time saver with high quality and security.
The co-founders behind Hotspring, Jon Mason and Varun Parange, build on their previous success with Trace VFX; one of the world’s largest VFX vendors with over 1,000 full-time staff, acquired by Technicolor after seven years in operation. In less than a year, Hotspring signed up with most of the leading remote VFX vendors and studios and delivered more than 5,000 shots across 230 projects to 30 clients around the globe. Hotspring’s initial focus has been on supporting commercial advertising projects but is already growing into other creative industries as part of their expansion plans.
Due to Covid-19 pandemic crisis, many vendors had to shut down in the middle of the projects and incomplete work. At that time Hotspring’s solution was to offer its own virtual teams to fulfil requests from Hotspring users, establishing a network of artists picking up where established vendors left off.
Hotspring CEO and co-founder Jon Mason said, “Studios looking to collaborate with a vendor to assist with the delivery of large complex projects is nothing new, it’s common place for studios to outsource portions of VFX work to remote vendors. However, working with one or more vendors, delivering work ranging from compositing to rotoscoping, can be an expensive organisational challenge. We created Hotspring to save studios money, give them valuable time back and give them access to global talent so scaling can be done on demand. This is the new model for VFX workflows, and it’s powered by Hotspring.”
Hotspring facilitates this process by providing a platform where studious can request a bid from up to three vendors. They return fixed bids and deadlines for each shot that studios could prioritise based on cost or speed or mix and match if there’s a specific vendor they prefer to work with on certain shots.
Hotspring global head of production Ben Stallard said, “The ability to triple bid work simultaneously on Hotspring drives efficiencies across the outsource supply chain. We are seeing clients save around 30 per cent when they use the app, even when they continue to use the same vendors. This unlocks the huge potential for studios big and small to take on more work and save money.”
To increase efficiency and speed up the process, Hotspring is hosting their datas in AWS. For time management and security, they send proxy files and watermarked versions of the studio’s raw footage before the studio decides which vendor to work with.
The platform also integrates with leading third-party software and is in the beta-phase of offering remote artists fully equipped virtual workstations to further secure, and democratise, the opportunity for global talent to play a bigger role in celebrated creative projects.