Wild Dream Films Fuels Business Growth With Facilis Shared Storage

Wild Dream Films is a multi-award winning production company based in Cardiff, UK, which has built an impressive reputation working in both the UK and US markets.

The company has produced content for all the high end US broadcasters including Nat Geo, MSNBC, Discovery, Science, TLC, Spike, H2 and has produced around 70 hours of programmes for the History Channel.

"Wild Dream Films has been Emmy nominated for our work and we are a world leader in Ancient world programmes," explains Stuart Clarke, Managing Director of Wild Dream Films. "Some of our standout and award winning films include 'The World's Tallest Man' (CH4/TLC), 'Dressed to Kill' (CH4), 'Subway Cops and the Mole Kings', 'Egypt Vice' (Spike), Ancient Discoveries' (History), 'Ancient Impossible' (H2) and 'Pint Sized Preachers' (Nat Geo)."

In order to maintain this high quality throughout its production workflow, Wild Dream Films took the strategic decision over 15 years ago to bring all post-production operations in house. Five years ago, the company invested in its first Facilis TerraBlock 24/EX12 24TB shared storage system to support its network of Avid edit suites. Now, the company has expanded and upgraded its TerraBlock to provide 96TB of storage which supports the entire facility and will underpin the company's rapid growth. Already installed and operational, running off both Ethernet and Fiber Channel, the TerraBlock supports five offline and one online Avid edit suites.

In developing its post resources, Wild Dream Films has worked closely with another Cardiff-based company – Brainy Monkey Post Production. The company's Managing Director, Andrij Evans, has provided a lot of guidance and support in developing this new production workflow and he is a big supporter of Facilis technology.

"With the large capacity TerraBlock, ingest and export no longer has to be tied to one specific Avid system," explains Evans. "Also, the speed of the system is fantastic – it easily copes with supplying multiple streams of video to multiple Avid systems without a hiccup."

For Stuart Clarke, their decision of which system to adopt rested on more than just the pros and cons of the hardware – it includes every aspect of the support the vendor provides. "What we really like about Facilis is the support that their team provides," Clarke explains. "I was amazed that Facilis could move so quickly when we needed a super fast purchase. I was skeptical that the new hard drives would fit effortlessly into our system but within an hour it was up and running without an issue (and still has not had a single issue). The speed of access to the media and sharing media is a key factor in choosing Facilis' TerraBlock. But more important is the reliability, which has always been superb and has never let us down.

"Now, with our TerraBlock upgrade, we can undertake more multiple projects with ease. It allows us to expand our storage capability and we can be more flexible in terms or adding more edit suites as we grow the company," states Stuart Clarke. "We aren't a facility company – we are a production company – and as we grow we are confident that the back-up that Facilis provides is a 'safety net' for our more complex post production processes. As deadlines are becoming shorter, it's great to know that we have a solid and reliable storage system that hasn't let us down over five year's operation. And we are excited to have a brand new set of drives which will mean we can keep pushing hard in producing quality content."

www.facilis.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online here, page 46.

(JP/MH)