2017 SW Rising Sun 1 - Business SA Design for Export Awards
Celebrating
South Australia's
Design-led
Exporters
Celebrating
South Australia's
Design-led
Exporters
Celebrating
South Australia's
Design-led
Exporters
Celebrating
South Australia's
Design-led
Exporters
Main menu:
AWARDS > 2017 Gallery
2017 WINNER
RISING SUN PICTURES
Category
DESIGN STRATEGY
VISUAL EFFECTS
Designed by
RISING SUN TEAM
About
Rising Sun Pictures delivers world class visual effects to clients around the world. Boasting clients such as 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Marvel, HBO and Sony Pictures Entertainment, RSP has contributed ground-breaking work to film and television projects inlcuding Academy Award™ winning Gravity, X-Men and Harry Potter series of films.
Clarity of Purpose and Context
RSP's core compency is to design and lead creatively challenging visual sequences and deliver quality visual effects to our clients. All aspects of the pipeline and value chain are fundamental in the success of our projects. Our purpose,vision and values are communicated in full company meetings where they're touched upon in parallel with a reviewof progress against strategy in the preceeding period. RSP has differentiated itself by delivering dynamic ffects (photorealistic complex real world phenomena) and more recently investing in its photo-realistic character capabaility to produce work of greater scale and scope. We’re a people business, and our client's experience is aramount to repeat sales; our staff engagement is paramount to client experience.
Operating in a competitive business environment, where global incentives and tax rebates have disrupted the industry, RSP is working towards a ‘Blue Ocean’ model to create a unique value proposition. RSP is not only investing in its product innovation to develop new capability, but is also investing in process innovation to create production efficiencies to meet the cost expectations of our clients. We’re currently in the process of redefining our strategy, to adapt our model, vision and mission in order to recognise this maturing industry. As we implement our strategic goals, we are engaging with our staff to cultivate a high performance culture that aligns with our desired future organisation.
Customer and Market Immersion
RSP's traditional clients, major motion picture film studios, want value for money - good work that is going to attract audiences to their film, executed at a globally competitive price. Our clients requests are paramount to the team at RSP, all stakeholders are engaged in the process of delivering for them, throughout every department and business unit. Recently, RSP introduced its 'Meet the People' initiative, where we broaden the 'face' of RSP through diffuse and targetted marketing opporutnities, thus creating and deepening personal contact with remote clients, which has proved very successful. This client contact and subsequent relationship building, has resulted in the quality delivery of work such as the Academy Award™ winning Gravity, as well as new, and repeat business, which demonstrates clear value proposition. The visual effects industry is muturing and its customers are changing. With the rise of streaming video on demand we have new players that have disrupted the environment.
Disruption
The visual effects industry has been disrupted by rebates and taxation offsets in global jurisdictions. This saw much of the visual effects work go to high rebate jursdictions, or low labour cost countries, often by the handful of multinational vendors. In 2013, this phenomena saw Rhythm and Hues, declare bankrupcy shortly after accepting the Academy Award™ for visual effects that year. This was also a time of high Australian dollar. RSP was forced to
address this changing market by downscaling, and focussing on process innovation in order to ensure efficiency. Since that time, we have seen export growth calculated at approximately 177%. We are currently monitoring the forces that influence our industry and are re-assessing our strategy to accurately reflect the changing market, including pursuing new areas of business using our intellectual property, including virtual reality, augmented reality and large-format projection. Likewise, we're targeting streaming video on demand content producers, such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Apple, which have also disrupted the market. Streaming Video on Demand (SVOD) has contributed to the changing way audiences view content, and is contributing to a changing film distribution model away from the traditional theatrical and broadcast releases. While we're not currently disrupting the market place, we seek to identify new business opportunities that will allow us to do so.
Design Leadership
RSP is an organic organisation which fosters innvoation. RSP believes that every employee should practice self management in order for the business to be successful. It has a ‘Stewardship’ leadership style and believes that
collaborating and capability building is what makes for a high performance organisation. Our values have defined what’s important to our culture. RSP has in the past innovated products such as the Academy Award™ winning cineSync to collaborate global visual reviews, enabling the spread of fidigtal film production to all points of the globe. Product innovation allows us to stay abreast of the changing capability in the industry, and is nurtured through not
only R&D activities, but also organically by our artists who are rising to complex challenges.
Business Model
As the industry mutures, we've identifying monopolistic competion and subsquent aggregation by the multi-nationals as vendors battle for market share among low-labour cost and/or high rebate jurisdictions. This has forced RSP to
reassess its business model, corporate and business strategies, which is currently in progess. Our design prowess attracts clients to RSP, but in a cost competitive market, RSP needs to differentiate itself, as well as competing on
price in order to achieve large bodies of work to achieve economies of scale and scope.
Sustainability
RSP has entered a Government progam to repurpose obselete technology to purchase more energy efficient machines which are more environmentally friendly. Likewise, we recycle material that can be recycled, including toner
cartridges and batteries. Socially, there is particularly a concern about the amount of women working in visual effects. RSP has an initiative to recruit more women in all area of the business, and we are seeing many more females come through our training programs. Likewise, RSP has promoted several women into Executive and Senior Management roles. Our Executive team is made up of 50% women. We are supporting our female Executives in furthering their management education with the UniSA's MBA program, where one received a WiMBA scholarship.
Commerciality
Our clients come to RSP for our creative leadership, often with a complex creative challenge that needs to be addressed. Having a Design Culture in the business allows us to take this leadership to provide solutions throughout
our production pipeline. Cients engage with us early in the production process, often prior to shooting, to inform shot and sequence design, conceptual and artistic direction by collaborating with the film-makers, including the Director.
Providing this artistic direction early on, allows us to establish a look & feel quickly that during post-production provdies the foundation for the final execution.
In the past few years, RSP has seen significant growth in its exported work, which is estimated at 177%. RSP's key focus for future growth is in Chinese-originated major motion picture industry. RSP's Academy Award™ nominated
Visual Effects Supervisor, Tim Crosbie, is currently in Beijing supervising on-set for the upcoming film 'Foresaken
Brotherhood'. Additionally, RSP's education business partnership with UniSA is a growth area, where there is strong interest from the Asia Pacific region, particularly China, to attend these courses, and likewise, to expand its course offerings into this region. Othe projects have included Prometheus, Hunger Games, Priates of the Carribean, The Water Diviner,Game of Thrones,The Last Samurai, Batman Begins, Blood Diamond, Get Smart, Superman Returns, Logan, Pan.
