LONDON — Soho-based visual effects facility Rumble VFX (rumblevfx.com) recently announced their official launch, having set up their business just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The studio creates VFX for the film and television industries, starting at the earliest stages of conception and planning, and following through to shoot supervision and the crafting and completion of all types of shots.
Photo (L-R): Cork, Zaccheo, Costin and Wright
Tim Zaccheo, Richard Costin, Joe Cork and Max Wright set up Rumble VFX at the end of 2019. All have worked in the industry for approximately two decades each and decided they were ready for their next challenge - to set up shop on their own.
The company is equally strong in both 2D and 3D work. Their work includes contributions to The Crown (Season 4 for Netflix/Sony Pictures), as they were part of the VES Award-winning episode, and completed 80 shots across the series. They recently delivered 100 shots for Pennyworth (Season 2, Warner Horizon Television).
Rumble VFX was barely a few months old when lockdown hit. Not surprisingly, start-up plans were immediately in flux, but the team were soon up and running remotely.
“For our remote setup, we work directly on the workstations at the studio via client machines at each artist's house,” explains Costin. “This has the benefit of simplicity as all the networking, software licensing and the like is in place, as well as benefiting turnaround times and security, because we are all collaborating on the server internally as normal and not constantly transmitting files to other local machines.”
The studio now has plans to slowly start getting back into its Soho space.
“I’m sure we’re not alone in running a combination of work setups,” says Cork. “It’s the best of both worlds really. We all miss bouncing ideas off each other in-person, and it’ll be so good, both creatively and practically, to get back to real-life reviews.”
The four founders have numerous BAFTA and Emmy nominations between them.
“We wanted to do things our own way as a culmination of all our experience, to choose projects that are right for us and work on our own R&D, with our own pipelines and put all this together to respond to the expanding market,” says Zaccheo.
“We are lucky in that we are equally strong in both 2D and 3D, but can also be competitive on costs as our overheads are reasonably low,” adds Wright. “We have some interesting projects in the pipeline and are looking forward to Rumble being part of more high-end TV and feature films projects.”