Building up a giant
Rhiannon and Blair Porter run Where Giants Roam, a CGI and 3D creative agency based in Scotland, offering their clients high-end advertising content through virtual photography, motion design and visual effects.
"It’s kind of hard to describe what we do," Blair said. "So, pitching in the Accelerator was tough. I guess put simply: we’re a CGI and motion studio which creates content for brands. We make things that aren’t real, look real. If a client says: ‘I thought that was a photo’, we know we’ve done a good job. The great thing about what we do is that the only actual limit is our (and our clients') imagination."
The imagination and skill of Rhiannon and Blair’s work was recognised recently with Where Giants Roam taking the ‘Creative Services Company of the Year’ at the Creative Pool awards (pictured above). "We were delighted to win," Rhiannon said. "As a studio we are lucky to work with some of the best and biggest agencies and brands in the world and it means a lot to be formally recognised. It was really rewarding the judges acknowledged not only our output, but also our team culture and push for gender equality, both of which are at the core of the studio."
First steps
"In a previous life we were Render Studio - and we got functional briefs with little scope for creativity," Blair recalls. "We rebranded specifically to have more creative conversations and it worked. Agencies came back and said: 'we have this idea…do you have suggestions?'. Our story changed overnight."
"Covid also helped change who we were as a business and who we worked for," Rhiannon added. "Where most of our work was with agencies, we started to work more with for the actual companies directly, the clients. We were slightly unusual when we joined the Accelerator as we weren’t a start-up, we’d been going for 10 years. The Accelerator was recommended by our accountant who thought it would be a good fit for us, they were right. We joined pre-Covid and had six months of benefit before everything changed."
Acceleration
"The Accelerator taught us about goals and helped us focus,” Rhiannon reflects. “Seeing things from a fresh perspective helped us immeasurably and also gave us the confidence to make what were difficult decisions.
"I remember going to one session early on in our journey and we were asked what our vision was and we were like: 'oh uh… pay the mortgage and survive'. We clearly weren’t looking at the business properly. We needed a plan, something that we could refer to and refresh which included questions like: 'where do you want to be?'. It’s fair to say that the mentoring was great."
