Business Assistance Programme

“The WoE’s ambition is to be recognised globally as a place of innovation, where leading designers, engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs combine with industry to create an innovation ecosystem that drives research, development and commercialisation – both within and across sectors.”

WoE Local Industrial Department for Business, Energy, & Industrial Strategy

 

In 2019 CAMERA secured funding from the European Structural Investment Fund (ESIF) to create a state-of-the-art Innovation Studio at the Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol and to deliver a tailored programme of support for SMEs and Sole Traders in the region.

Across 3 years, CAMERA worked with digital creative and healthcare tech businesses to provide access to motion capture facilities, world leading research, technical and production expertise and sector specific masterclasses.

While much of the support provided was through bespoke 1-2-1 studio sessions designed around a company’s specific needs, we also ran specialist workshops to support industry groups. ‘Women in Film and TV’, the Leading Membership Organisation for Women Working in Media, joined us for an introduction to motion capture and virtual production, whilst sessions for Physiotherapists and Personal Trainers focused on cutting edge research and application to their businesses.

CAMERA successfully supported 95 businesses, helping to introduce new innovation tools and techniques to 91% of these and enabling 38% of beneficiaries to increase investment in innovation. This support has led to the creation of 30 new jobs, with many businesses expecting the support to result in further employment over time.  Responses and one-to-one interviews in our follow up reports indicates that up to a further 171 roles could be created over the next two years as a result of the programme’s input.

Feedback from those who took part in the programme was incredibly positive and participants overwhelmingly found the support beneficial in addressing their personal barriers to growth and innovation.

CAMERA

Testimonials

We spoke to some our industry partners about their experience of working with CAMERA.

EarSwitch

“EarSwitch Ltd needed a way to allow people to visualise a new handsfree interface from earphones, controlled by voluntary movement of the ear-drum; a difficult task to demonstrate an invisible control.

EarSwitch also needed to demonstrate it’s function as a totally new control for augmented reality headsets.
Pooya Soltani, with Martin Parson’s help, demonstrated the first control of Microsoft HoloLens using the EarSwitch, and successfully produced a promotional video demonstration for the EarSwitch.
CAMERA has moved EarSwitch to the next level of validation; visual demonstration being worth (more than) a thousand words.”
Nick Gompertz – EarSwitch

Crack Magazine

“We worked with CAMERA to create 4 x 3D photogrammetry scans of legendary St Paul’s carnival sound systems. These were then integrated into a web platform called Everything is Music. The stitching, clean up and above all attention to detail from Martin and the team at CAMERA was brilliant. They understood our needs and met them in time and with excellent quality.
This support allowed us to present a well documented narrative in a new and exciting way for Bristol. We now want to take this idea and bring it to other cities across the glove.”
Ben Price – Crack Magazine

Whiley & Co

CAMERA Business Assistance

This Bath-based SME, specialists in creative digital technology, turned to CAMERA to help improve the quality of the avatars in its online training applications. Harnessing the valuable understanding it gained, the company has now introduced a new-to-market product (creation of digital humans for emotional intelligence training) and is offering independent motion capture services and digital human creation for other companies needing interactive media content. Ossian Whiley, the firm’s founder, says: “Working directly with CAMERA allowed us to assess a range of techniques for recreating hyper-realistic digital characters, accelerated our learning and enabled us to make decisions at very early stages regarding production-ready pipelines. Our team could otherwise have taken months of trial and error to reach the same conclusions”.