Celebrating 20 Years of Framestore in New York with Charles Howell

This year, Framestore New York celebrates its 20th anniversary - an important milestone that global president of advertising and content, Charles Howell, wants to mark.

“I think it’s important to celebrate being in a city for 20 years - there’s something to be said for that,” he tells LBB. “We've grown the team and we have so many great people here in New York - and a lot of them have been here since day one.”

Charles is a Framestore veteran himself, joining the London studio as a runner straight out of university - a serendipitous move that started a 25 year journey with the company. In 15 years at Framestore London, he worked his way up through the ranks, from PA to VFX coordinator to head of production for the film department, before moving to Montreal, where he was head of production for three and a half years. Charles moved to his current locale as managing director of Framestore New York in 2018, and has been global president of advertising and content for the past two years.

Reflecting on his career at the VFX powerhouse across different regions, and on the New York studio’s two decades, Charles says, “One of the good things about Framestore is, whichever city you're in, it always feels like Framestore. It's the same kind of people that are driven by innovation and creativity. They're a really friendly, lovely, welcoming bunch.” That being said, each office does have its unique dynamic and culture as well. 

Charles’ New York experience has largely been shaped by his new remit of the fast-moving world of advertising, as opposed to the feature films he had worked on and overseen in London and Montreal. “But the level of quality and finish needs to be just as good. That's what we pride ourselves on here,” he adds. 

In the UK, Charles had worked on the likes of the ‘Paddington’ film franchise, as well as the Oscar-winning film ‘Gravity’. “That was a really special moment for me,” he says. “I spent over three years working on that project, through pre-production, production and post. We reinvented a lot of filmmaking processes during that project and I got to see [director] Alfonso Cuarón work almost every day, seeing his level of focus and craft… And him working with DOP Emmanuel Lubezki and Tim Webber, our VFX supervisor and company CCO, developing new techniques.”

Charles continues, “It's really interesting, when you're working on a film with that level of filmmaker, doing something that hasn't been done before, it’s really rewarding but it wasn't always the most comfortable space to be.”

Above: Charles Howell

He explains, “There were weeks where I thought, ‘I'm not sure how we're going to get to the end of this’. But because we had a really great team working on a sort of ‘Faberge egg’ of a project, we knew we were going to find a way to do it somehow.”

Charles also met his wife - a New Yorker - working on ‘Gravity’, adding some extra sentimentality to the project and another reason to end up working in the Big Apple today.

Now focused on Framestore’s global advertising output from New York, Charles highlights this year’s Hellmann’s Super Bowl work and the company’s long-term involvement with the GEICO gecko as standout, successful campaigns. “The level of craft and attention to detail that goes into the guardianship of that sort of brand character is really impressive,” he says, also pointing out the award-winning work that Framestore New York’s immersive team produces.

“They won a Webby Award for an immersive experience we produced in conjunction with HBO Max to celebrate the launch of the ‘Sex and the City’ spin-off. Our immersive team delivers a varied range of projects, whether it's taking a group of school kids on a field trip to Mars in the world's first group VR experience - as they did about 10 years ago now - through to producing interactive, immersive experiences at the top of [skyscraper] One Vanderbilt.”

The team creates content for VR and AR headsets too, and recently designed, built and installed the integrated digital content system in Hudson Yards, delivering high-end video content to over 100 screens in one of the biggest real estate projects in the history of the US.

“It's this kind of space that you might not expect to see Framestore in. But we say that if you've looked at a screen in the last 24 hours, you've probably seen Framestore’s work. Having all the screens in Hudson Yards and being on mobile and VR headsets, TV screens and movie screens, I think there's probably a lot of truth to that.”

Above: Framestore New York's VR and experiential work

This is all the more believable when you consider Framestore New York’s episodic work, including Netflix’s ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ and ‘One Piece’ adaptations, and ‘Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan’ and ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ on Amazon Prime, to name a few.

“This office delivers a really big variety of work,” says Charles, “and we've got specialists that work in each of those verticals. The advertising work is really important to us, as is the immersive work and episodic, and it’s that variety that keeps the team engaged.”

Across all these verticals, Charles says that Framestore has always operated at the cutting edge of both tech and creativity - with the next step being artificial intelligence.

Above: The Framestore New York office

“We very much understand the significance of AI, and there's some concern and caution within the VFX community, regarding its role in the creative industries - notwithstanding things like copyright issues and fair use. So that’s something the industry is slightly grappling with."

“There's an element of people overestimating the short term while underestimating the long term implications of the technology,” he adds. “So there's a level of suspicion and fear that it's going to take away jobs and that kind of thing. But certainly, I think in the short to medium term, it's not going to have that level of impact. But I think the longer term impact could be quite significant to lots of industries, not just visual effects.”

Framestore is already adapting to various approaches when it comes to AI, with different divisions, artists and clients having ‘varying degrees of sensitivity’ towards the new tools. The company’s structured but varied approach involves focus groups looking at different capabilities, including markerless motion capture, rendering, CG compositing and more.

“[But] we obviously want to protect the input of the artist. The role of the artist is paramount at Framestore,” says Charles. “We've always worked across technical innovations - the ditching of analogue, digital film… And they've never meant we were doing less. AI is a similar thing, it's going to enable us to do more, and probably do things that aren't currently possible. There are areas it’s going to take us, like NeRFs or volumetric and CG immersive experiences. But I think there's probably going to be new platforms, ultimately, that come out of this. So we’ll be doing more, not less.”

And Framestore is already putting this tech to use ‘under the hood’, incorporating AI not just into how they generate pixels on screen, but how they manage the work and business as a whole.

For Charles, what makes the work they produce so interesting and impressive - even after 25+ years at the company - is its variety. Whether it’s from the New York office or elsewhere, a lot of effort goes into maintaining the Framestore culture and cross-network collaboration to ensure the quality of work, regardless of its medium, is at its best.

Above: Framestore's work for Disney ('Wandavision'), Hellmann's and Netflix ('One Piece')

“Because we work on such diverse types of work, it gives us the opportunity to try out techniques in one part of the business and cross pollinate it into other parts,” explains Charles. “So we expel quite a lot of energy in assuring there's good connectivity between the different sites and the different groups that work within Framestore - be it the theme park rides or the advertising or the film business. It takes all that effort to ensure these teams are talking to each other and that there are channels there for them to communicate with each other.”

Charles himself works directly across four sites - London, New York, Chicago and LA - and ensures he has his ear to the ground for all the happenings across the company’s remit. Speaking regularly with Fiona Walkinshaw, global CEO for film and episodic, and Karl Woolley, global head of immersive, the learnings from each division are shared - helped by the strides made with Framestore’s internal communications in the last eight months.

“With technical news feeds, we broadcast ‘this is the latest innovation over here’, ‘this is what this team are working over there’, so everyone in the business can have eyes on it and be curious about it, and know who to go to. A big part of the job is knitting that together and making sure there's a mechanism for sharing all that information.”

And while Charles’ other big focus in recent years, and one he’s set to continue through 2024, is on fostering ‘the best possible client experience’ at Framestore, it’s this connectedness through enhanced internal systems that he believes will bring 20 more successful years at Framestore New York, and all the other studios around the world.

“Things in advertising move quickly,” he says. “When you're working in such a dynamic field, you need to have very good visibility on what your teams are up to… It just means we can be more efficient - both internally and in giving our clients access to the best talent in the world - whether that may be in New York, London, Chicago or wherever.”