When Technicolor called us up with an urgent request for help, we responded swiftly. After a previous tech partner let the business down, Technicolor needed a major restart to its advanced, cloud-based content management system for film professionals. There were only 12 weeks to get the job done, but we’re no stranger to working at pace. The race was on.

Five BAFTAs, four Academy Awards, two Emmys and nearly 100 D&AD Pencils – these are just some of the accolades awarded to Technicolor (with its supply-chain and logistics arm now rebranded as Vantiva), an international community of VFX artists and technologists. As a business, it creates, supports and distributes extraordinary content experiences all over the world. Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, Sonic The Hedgehog; all of these wouldn’t have made it to the big screen without Technicolor.

In the film business, project hitches are common. For Technicolor, an existing tech partner had failed to deliver to rave reviews and its project was left unfinished. It would need a total restart, if this industry-leading behemoth was to ever meet its agreements with a variety of famous studios. Technicolor came to UIC Digital in need of help, with a time-sensitive, multi-million pound project that would become one of the most advanced media distribution systems on the face of the planet.

This system was called Technicolor Showcase, a cloud-based content management system for film professionals that gave around the clock access to content on any device, from anywhere, anytime, on a single, intuitive portal. That includes production services, content approvals, ops management for archives and orders and sales support for authorisation, sales collateral and content distribution.

With our deep broadcast video experience, Technicolor felt confident leaving the product in our hands.

Join us in the war room

Whilst the design and development of Technicolor Showcase was still early on in its lifecycle, the project itself was quite far down the line. It meant an extremely tight deadline loomed to launch a completely new cloud-based infrastructure and modern user interface. To get it done, we went onto a war room footing, with all hands on deck and even key stakeholders at Technicolor coming on board to work from our London office during the project. This is how we like to work at UIC Digital, with collaboration as one team at the core of all we do. It means collaboration, decision-making, speed and quality are all optimised to maximum effect. When we say we’re by your side, we really mean it.

From a technical perspective, the portal needed to work seamlessly across web and iOS platforms. It’s built using Angular.js and Javascript, giving us the flexibility to respond dynamically across features and devices. A responsive layout made sure that, no matter what screen you’re viewing from, Technicolor Showcase could be used anywhere, on anything. It also uses HTML5 and LESS stylesheets, keeping web development streamlined – the former for richly programmed features and the latter a preprocessor for CSS to make styling efficient and organised.

For tablets, Technicolor Showcase is written in Objective-C, one of the best programming languages for iOS. It means the user interface is optimised for tablets, with a layout and design tailored to a tablet’s larger screen without losing any engaging features.

Within just three months, we produced a digital hub that turned heads, the first of its kind in the content space and at the leading edge of transformative design and technology. A perfect match for Technicolor. As a creative engineering company, we’ve got an unwavering commitment to quality, never sacrificing this in place of time, speed or budget.

Coming good on our promises

With this mantra – and our tried and tested formula of bringing specialists together – we delivered a portal that not only showcased Technicolors technical prowess but also came in on time, on budget and became a commercial success. We pride ourselves on always doing right by our clients, on transparency, ownership, honesty and delivering on our promises. On building close relationships with our clients that foster trust, whilst using deep technical, design and delivery capabilities to hit the mark as a team.

With over 5M+ assets and five petabytes (that’s over 1,000 terabytes) of content stored since its launch, the project was a true success. And it didn’t just showcase Technicolor’s industry-leading capability, it stopped the show.