Origami Platform is now an independent company. This is the story of how we got here.

The idea behind Origami didn't come from a single job. It came from a conversation at a desk.

Back in 2017 at Mission, in our old office at Buspace Studios, we'd been chewing on a question: what was the next stage of our evolution as a lab and dailies business?

We had built genuinely robust systems good people, good methods, documentation, workflows and we were reaching the upper limit of what people and process alone could do. Every production generated a mass of information that travelled by hand: lens data and distortion maps that got refilled job after job, paperwork that got re-entered, metadata that arrived on set and quietly died somewhere on the way to post.

The conclusion we came to was simple to say and hard to do: if metadata could be captured once and made to travel organised, combined and trusted, then you could build automation on top of it. That instinct predates the industry's 2030 Vision papers by a couple of years. We just didn't have a tool that could do it.

Looking for the tool that didn't exist

So we did what we'd always done: we went looking for something to cobble together. Mission's workflows had historically been built by lashing best-of-breed tools and hardware together in clever ways, and we assumed this would be no different. Over the best part of three years we researched dozens of media asset management and production asset management platforms, plus the storage systems underneath them, evaluating whether we could script around one, extend one, or pay a vendor to build what was missing.

The research was exhaustive, and the answer kept coming back the same. Nothing fitted. Nothing was built for the way media and metadata actually move from camera to post. If we wanted it, we'd have to build it.

The job that focused everything

Then came the production that turned a broad idea into a specific one, a film where effectively every shot was a VFX shot, with very large plates, shot on ALEXA 65 at a time when those workflows were genuinely cumbersome.

We ran a large lab across multiple nodes and locations, wired directly into editorial next door. Rushes were ingested and processed as they came off the stage; within hours, editorial was cutting, and the director was reviewing most of each day's footage the same day. That side ran smoothly, but it took a lot of people, a lot of hardware, and a lot of organisation.

The VFX pulls were another matter. Lab work is predictable: consistent volume every day. Pull requests are the opposite, days of silence followed by days of chaos, and almost always at the worst possible moment.

For that production, turnover requests were still arriving after the film was in cinemas; an updated version with improved visual effects was sent to cinemas about a week after release. When work is time-critical, people rush, and rushing is when expensive things go wrong, not just in the lab, but everywhere downstream.

Every pull took a dedicated operator hours. Multiply that by every shot in a film, and the maths stops working. That was the wake-up call: the thing we'd been talking about in the abstract, metadata travelling cleanly, automation built on top had an obvious first job.

Pulls.

Building it

When COVID paused the industry, we took the chance to prove the idea. With around £50,000 in funding from Clwstwr, the Cardiff University-led R&D programme for the Welsh creative industries, match-funded by Mission, we assembled a small team, brought in outside development expertise, and built a proof of concept for automating VFX pulls, along with the media and metadata management underneath that makes automation possible.

It was harder than we expected. But the concepts worked, and we started using the tooling on our own productions. At the end of the funded project, we took stock, gave ourselves another six months to keep building, and reviewed again. The conclusion at that review was the one we'd half-known for years: no one else was going to build this, and it couldn't stay an internal side project. It had to become a product.

From stealth project to software company

In April 2022, at the BSC Expo, Origami stopped being a stealth project. We announced it, and we started showing people what it could do. Although at that stage it still ran as an internal platform on productions we operated ourselves, including a major streaming series where shots that once took half a day to turn over were being resolved with the vendor in minutes.

Over the following years, we did the unglamorous work that separates a clever prototype from a real product: robustness, scalability, cloud deployment, and support. We opened it to a small group of external beta customers, listened hard, and built again. Then we made it a proper self-serve SaaS product with its own team, its own sales, and its own customer support, running on the productions you've seen, live at post houses across the UK and beyond.

Why independent, and why now?

A services business and a software business are different animals. They grow differently, invest differently, and serve customers differently. But for Origami, independence solves something more specific than structure.

First, focus. Origami is not a side project inside a services company anymore; it is the entire business of the company that makes it.

Second, trust. Post facilities were understandably wary of adopting a platform owned by a company that also competed for the same services work. Nobody wants a Trojan horse in their pipeline. As an independent company, Origami works for its customers and no one else.

And third, growth: an independent Origami is a clean vehicle for the investment it needs to take the platform to production, post facilities, studios and content owners worldwide.

The platform itself doesn't change. Origami handles VFX and conform pulls, carries metadata from set through to finishing, connects storage across facilities, and gets the right colour to the right vendor without anyone spending an afternoon tracking it down.

What's next

Origami has already grown beyond pulls. It is now a media management and metadata management platform in its own right, and the roadmap takes it back to those early dreams from that desk at Buspace Studios.

Because the ambition was never just to automate one painful workflow. It was a single tool that carried information all the way from the moment of acquisition on set, through every stage of post-production, to final delivery, putting the right information in front of every creative stakeholder along the chain, exactly when they needed it.

Nine years ago this was a conversation at a desk about metadata. Today it's an independent software company, finally free to build the whole idea.

If you'd like to see what Origami looks like on one of your turnovers, book a demo at origamiplatform.io.