Sheep, a UK-based visual effects (VFX) SME, is led by a project team of Gary Palmer (CEO/project manager), Jake Laver (CTO/back-end developer), Richard Murray (COO/commercial lead) and Ryan Layne (head of AI). The VFX industry is expanding rapidly, with an annual growth rate of 11.4%. Despite this, it faces significant challenges due to manual processes such as rotoscoping, which requires eight hours to process just one second of footage. This laborious task costs the industry £80 per second, amounting to £800M annually for 10M seconds of content. Such inefficiencies delay the release of VFX-intensive films and TV shows by up to six months, impacting their relevance and profitability. In the short term, these issues stifle creative potential, while in the long term, they threaten the industry's survival. VFX artists, burdened by monotonous work, risk burnout and may leave the field, and VFX companies face financial instability, especially during industry strikes. Sheep is developing Spotlight, an end-to-end AI platform for automated Hollywood-grade rotoscoping and VFX workflow optimisation with powerful iterative control. This innovative platform offers a 70% reduction in costs and timelines, saving £63K, on average, per film. London VFX houses will benefit from this innovation, as they can improve their tight profit margins of 2-3%. Spotlight will enable clients to take on 50% more projects, safeguarding 3.5K UK VFX jobs in the long term. The platform lowers the entry barriers for high-quality VFX, enabling individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to create captivating visual stories. This shift is expected to foster the creation of more diverse content.

Electric Sheep is accelerating the Visual Effects (VFX) industry with cutting-edge AI technology. With a focus on speed, security and scale, we're streamlining Film/TV workflows. After years of camera to post experience for Netflix, Amazon and Disney among others, we saw an opportunity to take the challenges faced in VFX and leverage emerging AI technology to solve them. Thus Electric Sheep was born. The first step on our journey is rotoscoping. This is the process of "cutting out" foregrounds from backgrounds so special effects can be added. Rotoscoping is an essential step for practically all VFX workflows. This funding allows us to improve our output and add a crucial feature that has come up time and time again when talking with industry experts. For the industry it is essential the "cutting out" (rotoscoping) is consistent frame to frame - known as interframe consistency. This is typically hard for AI as it analyses each frame in silo. The next step on our journey is to teach our AI how to be consistent from frame to frame. Our mission is to allow artists to get back to what they do best - telling stories through creative, stunning and impactful visual effects.