Tippett Studio Customer Story

Tippett Studio chooses TACTIC Atlas for its digital media library needs

Introduction and Business Problems

Tippett Studio is a premier, full-service, animation and visual effects production company helmed by two-time Oscar and Emmy award winner Mr. Phil Tippett, and staffed by a world-class team dedicated to delivering groundbreaking visual storytelling solutions. From hands-on animation to bleeding-edge computer graphics, Tippett’s US and Canadian studios service clients from around the world, and have a reputation for collaboration, excellence and customer satisfaction.

The Problem

Over a span of four decades, Tippett Studio has amassed a massive portfolio of digital and physical film production assets dating all the way back to the original Star Wars film. These assets were stored on disparate media throughout the enterprise including photos, design drawings, concept art, storyboards, posters, set models, film, and video. In the blur of day-to-day business operations over the decades, these priceless assets were placed in storage and largely forgotten. An easy-to-use, cost-effective, and highly customizable solution was needed to bring them all together in one single, digital repository.

“Tippett Studio possesses a large collection of historically significant film production assets. Because we lacked a curation system or procedure for storing the assets, they got placed wherever we could find space for them throughout the organization,” said Sanjay Das, partner and CEO at Tippett Studios. “To remedy this situation we turned to Southpaw Technology and its TACTIC software to organize and manage all of these digital and physical assets.”

The Solution: TACTIC Atlas

Tippett Studio’s search for an appropriate solution to their storage issues included some key functions and features that had to be included ‘out of the box’. This included:  

  • Collections of assets in a digital storehouse 

  • Organizing by asset type and keywords 

  • Track changes 

  • Easy to use

  • Highly flexible 

  • Inventory management with version control

The search ended at Southpaw with the selection of TACTIC Atlas, a secure, cloud-based archiving product that enables teams to store, manage, organize and search for digital assets in the organization. TACTIC Atlas is highly configurable, with a straightforward setup process that can be customized to any organization’s needs. Once it was set up, Tippet quickly started organizing digital assets of all types (photos, design drawings, concept art, storyboards, etc) from a range of projects, including Star Wars, Robocop, Starship Troopers, and Mad God, and others. The assets are all now searchable by keywords.

Business Gains

TACTIC Atlas enabled the upload of specific asset types (for example, photos, drawings and video) with customized forms for each type to gather and store rich data for each asset. With different access levels, users at multiple company sites are using TACTIC Atlas to securely manage and track their portfolio of images from film and VFX projects. 

The Tippett team was particularly impressed with the ease of use and the overall flexibility of TACTIC Atlas. Specifically:

  • The ease with which Tippett was able to set up the system to their preferences and create custom metadata, keywords, and collections. 

  • The ability of TACTIC Atlas to easily create and manage collections of digital assets based on specific film or TV projects. In effect, TACTIC Atlas delivered highly usable and effective ‘Digital Playlists’ for entire asset sets. This allowed the Tippett team to manage assets without the formality of an archival methodology. 

  • TACTIC Atlas drastically reduced the time and effort required to find specific assets. Prior to using TACTIC Atlas, staff could spend several hours to find a particular asset. TACTIC Atlas’s advanced search capabilities reduced this time to seconds.

  • TACTIC Atlas has built-in security features to give certain users varying levels of access.

  • Tippett is using TACTIC Atlas’s versioning to maintain multiple resolution files (e.g. 2K/4K/8K) for the same digital asset. 

  • TACTIC Atlas enables Tippett to enter notes on the history and/or ongoing use of an asset to track where/how it was used and/or continues to be used.

Tippett’s Sanjay Das: “Our team is very impressed with the ease of use and the overall flexibility of Southpaw’s media library product. In a short period of time, we have been able to easily define custom metadata, keywords and collections of assets. In particular, the ability of TACTIC Atlas to easily create and manage collections is a game changer for our business. Essentially, this solution offers us a corporate ‘Digital Playlists’ option for the entire collection, which adds an accessibility option that we have never had in the past.”

“TACTIC Atlas has allowed us to preserve the legacy of Phil Tippett and the studio, especially in the stop motion animation,” added Kalim Winata from Tippett. “With the tool, we can easily catalog and track the creation and repairs of the puppets and the armatures. These are crucial for conservation and preservation, which are the common issues for preservation and conservation by big and small institutions.

Conclusion

Overall, the use of TACTIC Atlas provided Tippett Studios with an economical, easy-to-use, flexible solution for their media library and archiving needs that will save them days of time from what existed before.