CASE STUDIES

• Wild Card PR
• Clarity
• Add Juice
• AG Design
• Altcom Ltd
• Atlantic FM
• Business Cornwall
• Channel Computing
• Design for Sport
• German IT Development
• Go24
• InfoTeam
• IntoArt Solutions LLP
• Leap Media
• Luminate Marketing
• Niddocks
• Richard Quick Design
• Seed Brand Communications
• Unique Media
• Webfooted Designs

REPORTS

ICT and Media

Overview
When Hewlett Packard needed a video production company to create a simultaneous live webcast of bands performing in Athens, Dubai, Istanbul and Johannesburg, Unique Media was a natural choice. It had already pioneered several groundbreaking uses of streaming technology, including Tony Blair answering questions on You Tube, as well the biggest ever live gig in "Second Life". For Charla Harris, who'd started up Unique's Cornwall branch only a few months before, jetting off to Johannesburg to oversee filming at the venue for the finale of HP 'Design Your Personal Life' event, was a pretty amazing experience.
A lot had happened for Charla since she'd completed her degree in Broadcasting at University College Falmouth a few months earlier. At that time, she'd been sure of two things - she wanted to build a career as a video-maker and she wanted to stay in Cornwall. One way of achieving this was to set up a production company, and the opportunity to do so came sooner than she'd expected.
"After graduating in the summer, I was freelancing as a camera operator filming the sailing races for Falmouth Week," Charla explains, "and the company that was streaming the footage online for the event's website was Unique Media. After it was over, Jon Stethridge, who runs the company, asked me to do some filming out in Paris for them. While there I mentioned that I was thinking of starting my own business, and Jon asked how I'd feel about setting up a sister company to Unique in Cornwall."
Stethridge himself is originally from the county and had set up Unique Media there in 1994. Since then he'd opened offices in London and then to Bristol, transforming it from a maker of corporate videos into one of Europe's leading providers of interactive and streaming web content.
By 2007, Cornwall's media landscape had also changed dramatically. High-speed broadband was one factor; another was the stream of talent emerging from media-related courses at the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC). For a company like Unique it made plenty of sense to have a presence in this vibrant new environment. As Charla says: "It's already a highly creative place to work, and over the next few years the media industry here looks set to explode. It's so much more exciting to be a part of that rather than a small fish in the overcrowded London pond."

Workforce
"Basically I run the business in Cornwall on my own," Charla says, "but I'm lucky to have such excellent freelance people to work with - camera crews, editors, and directors - based both here and elsewhere. It's also great to be able to draw on the abilities of some of the students at Falmouth - I don't see them so much as free talent but an incredible resource of fresh talent. And there's no shortage of skills in areas like graphics and digital animation, which are hugely important to the sort of web-based content we provide."

Support
"University College Falmouth's director of digital media innovation has made a huge difference in getting the company off the ground - a real stepping stone," Charla says. "The Unlocking Cornish Potential (UCP) scheme has also helped, not just with funding but also through some really expert business support from a brilliant mentor with 30 years of marketing experience. And Cornwall Pure Business has given me lots of contacts and advice on networking." She sees networking as particularly important, and says that word-of-mouth has played a big part in the new company's initial success: "One of the best things about working here is that you naturally get to know other people working in the sector very easily. This isn't to say that there's no competition - but it feels like a healthy competitiveness, and there's also a great sense of mutual support."

Clients
Unique works with a wide range of clients, from SMEs to some of the world's best-known companies and bands (The Rolling Stones and The Who, to name just two). Charla has already brought in substantial business from Cornwallbased organisations including the Duchy Health Charity and institutions that form part of the CUC, for which Unique has provided web-streaming and podcasts of guest lectures and video-based marketing materials. Charla - whose first love is documentary film-making - also aims to build a more mainstream broadcast TV production strand in future.

Technology
Unique enjoys very reasonably priced incubation facilities at the CUC's Tremough campus near Penryn, giving easy access to a full range of industry-standard video production and digital technologies. These include a fully equipped TV studio with Green Screen and Chroma-key technology, and a dedicated edit suite in the company's office.