Jellyfish Pictures: Creating VFX and Collaboration with KCP

At the beginning of March, Key Capital Partners (KCP) announced it has completed a minority investment into a global award-winning animation production company Jellyfish Pictures. With the help of the deal, the company intends to expand growing its staff to over 600 employees in 2022. We talked to Phil Dobree – CEO of Jellyfish Pictures – to ask him about the partnership with KCP, the company's approach to teamwork, and its future plans.

Jellyfish Pictures

I’m Phil Dobree, founder and CEO of Jellyfish Pictures. Jellyfish was founded in 2001 and over the past 20 years, the business has grown from two employees to over 350, with plans to grow to 600 by the end of 2022. We’re sought out by clients for world-class animation and VFX for film and television, which is what we set out to achieve from the beginning. On the VFX side, we’ve recently completed work on the latest addition to Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise The Book of Boba Fett, as well as blockbuster movies such as Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Last Jedi, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Kingsman, The Secret Service.

Our TV Drama credits include BBC’s This is Going to Hurt, Gangs of London (Sky), and Amazon Prime’s Hanna. On the animation side, we’re currently partnered with Netflix working on a highly anticipated Roald Dahl animated event series. This follows collaborating with DreamWorks Animation on feature film Spirit: Untamed, and animation special How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming and several series of top-rated children’s shows; Dennis and Gnasher: Unleashed (CBBC), Floogals (Universal Kids), and Bitz & Bob (Cbeebies). Through Jellyfish Originals, we develop and manage our own original animated Kids & Family content for a global market.  

It’s hard to pull out projects that make me more proud than others but for sure, some stick in the mind as helping to put the company more firmly on the map on the road to where we are now. For me, one of those would be Fight for Life for BBC ONE that we worked on back in 2007. Real-life stories from patients in A&E were fused with our CG recreations of how the human body fights in times of crisis. We tried to bring film levels of rendering, lighting, and visceral animation to broadcast TV, and the human body hadn’t been seen from the inside in that way before. Our work there was subsequently recognized by awards from organizations including the Visual Effects Society (VES),  BAFTA, and the Royal Television Society (RTS).

Collaboration with KCP

Key Capital Partners (KCP) is an investment company with whom we first spoke in October 2021. They count recognizing ambition and potential as one of their key strengths. Considering the expansion we’re looking to achieve, it’s a perfect alliance. That this investment has been made speaks to the strength of the creative content industry in the UK right now. We’re a business that has demonstrated innovation and ambition since our founding and KCP has an outstanding track record of supporting companies like us to grow. It’s an exciting time for the creative TV and film industry in the UK. 

How Jellyfish Pictures Will Operate Now

Internally, our executive team has been supplemented by the addition of Lynton Barker and Philip Duquenoy of KCP as Non-Executive Chairman and Non-Executive Director respectively.

In terms of the work that we do and our day-to-day running, there won’t be any changes. KCP believes in our existing ambition, expertise, and vision for the company. They support our current growth plan and are bringing their knowledge and financial acumen in order to achieve that. 

We have seen an unprecedented demand for our services over the last year and this investment allows us to accelerate the company’s growth, providing our clients and partners with the technical and creative resources to continue to bring compelling, award-winning work to the screen. It will also help us reach our aim of growing the team here to more than 600 staff in 2022 and advance the development and production of our original kids and family content through Jellyfish Originals.

We’ll also be leveraging the investment to further our long-term work in creating the most flexible, global, and collaborative studio model in the industry. Setting up global access hubs in Asia and North America to seamlessly access talent and enable collaboration on creative media. 

The Metaverse

In 20 years, we’ve focused on innovation and delivering outstanding content for clients wherever it’s needed, so we aren’t ruling out creating VFX for the metaverse. But in general, it’s not an area we’re currently focused on in a major way. Demand for the more linear VFX and animation content for more traditional channels that we’ve built our reputation on is at record levels. We’re mainly focused there, ensuring that we continue to lead in those spaces, deliver for our clients and further innovate the studio model so that our industry model is better equipped to seamlessly create all types of VFX and animation content.

Teamwork

Teamwork is what Jellyfish and our industry are built on. I see Jellyfish Pictures as a global network of hugely talented people working together. That’s the only way our work gets made and we invest heavily into facilitating that as much as we can, both in the in-person and remote sense.

The company’s HQ is in a state-of-the-art facility in Brixton, London, with a further studio in Sheffield which are hubs for our hugely talented, global network of staff. Hubs that I have to say, many of us are pleased to get back to so that we can experience teamwork in person. 

But long before COVID made working from home a necessity, Jellyfish pioneered remote working to bring global teams together. We opened the largest virtual studio within animation and VFX at the end of 2014 and spearheaded the use of virtual and cloud technologies the year after. We set up virtual studios using advanced, centralized, secure technology. This allowed the company to break away from the traditional studio model, access talent around the world, and help to create a modern future proof facility. We just didn’t know at the time how that would be tested and valued quite so much in the near future. 

We now call our approach blended. There are some tasks that are perhaps better done in the studio and others that are just as productive at home. Plus we have specialist artists on our team who are based all over the world. In the past 7 years, we’ve been working towards the agile, more flexible operation that we have now, that enables a healthier work/life balance for our artists and a seamless workflow for productions and talent across the globe. 

Roadmap

I think you will hear a lot from us in 2022 because it’s an exciting time for us, for globally based talent, and for the industry in general. We’ve already talked about expanding our team to more than 600 staff this year so I hope you’re going to hear that we’ve found those artists and achieved that goal. 

In recent years, we’ve brought on talent from around the world by using Teradici Cloud and Microsoft Azure. We’ve had joiners from countries including Israel, India, North America, Finland, Canada, Spain, and Réunion. A Jellyfish artist has the same experience as a colleague working 6,000 miles away. So we’ll continue to go where the talent is and make it even easier for them to do their best work.

In evolving the agile studio model we established over seven years ago, we’ll expand our partnerships across Europe, Asia, and Canada.  As traditional technological barriers continue to fall, we are going to continue to enable the seamless bringing together of talents and workflows across the globe. Via the public cloud and new data centers around the world, we’ll bring together vendors, artists, and creators in a connected environment that is going to allow optimized collaboration between artists and outstanding results for clients. 

Technology is enabling a new world for talent, media, and our clients and we’re proud to be leading the way. 

Phil Dobree, Chief Executive Officer at Jellyfish Pictures

Interview conducted by Ana Kessler