Prime Focus wins Red Bee deal

Prime Focus sealed the deal to support Red Bee Media’s creative services department in the final round of a tender process that began at the start of the year.

The post company will build a new facility at Red Bee Media’s Broadcast Centre in West London, operating 11 suites to support Red Bee’s work supplying channel branding and promos for clients such as the BBC and UKTV.

Prime Focus Broadcast UK managing director Rowan Bray declined to reveal the exact value of the deal.

“This is a multimillion pound agreement. Red Bee is a good deal-maker, but it recognised the commercial imperative for Prime Focus to make a margin.”

The number of suites will be slightly reduced compared with the current BBC S&PP operation.

Bray said this was due in part to the implementation of tapeless workflows and the option to use Prime Focus’s Soho sites.

“Prime Focus has a large amount of resources and we leveraged our size, scope and global reach, plus we’ve got workflow managers and people whose job it is to configure technology - it would have been hard to make [the contract] work in a smaller facility,” Bray said.

“But it’s not just about processes - a great deal of attention was also paid to the level of creativity we could offer.”

Prime Focus will replace the existing Quantel eQ finishing system with Smoke, Avid Media Composer, Pro Tools and captioning suites to finish around 5,000 promotional items each year.

The Soho-based post house will take over from BBC S&PP from August and, where possible, the latter’s staff will move across to Prime Focus.

Red Bee Media business director Mandy Combes said: “Prime Focus’ broad commercial post-production expertise will support Red Bee Media’s business aspirations and help us to continue producing outstanding work for our clients.”

Short-form work already makes up around 20% of Prime Focus’s slate, with clients including Discovery, Channel 4, Sci Fi and MTV, and a wide variety of commercials.