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Conversations with Andy Doyle from Filmily Limited

9th November 2020
Filmily

Dan White spoke to Andy Doyle, Co-Founder of Filmily and finalist of this year’s Tech South West Innovation Award. Andy shares his journey and how COVID-19 has transformed Filmily’s offering to achieve increased exposure internationally.

Firstly, thank you for sitting down with me today. Let’s start with a little bit about Filmily and how you have got to where you are today?

My background is in Software Engineering, mainly in TV working with broadcasters – hence the link to video with Filmily. I came up with the idea for Filmily nearly 5 years ago now. Remember when everyone used to put disposable cameras on the tables at weddings to capture the day? Well, it got us thinking whether there was an app that would replace this – turns out there wasn’t! The idea was to build a platform that would take content from phones and automatically create a polished and professional looking video, within minutes.

Three years ago, myself and my business partner set up the company, received a grant from Innovate UK and produced a protype. That was the start of Filmily, albeit our offering and platform has continued to evolve ever since.

And on the point of continuously developing the platform, I would like to congratulate you for being shortlisted for the Innovation Award at Tech South West Award 2020! Tell us more about the innovative work you do…

Thank you, we are delighted to be shortlisted for this award! The core of what Filmily does, is it takes content in and understands every second of the recording. Where the content was recorded, what direction, zoom levels, altitude etc and all from the handset. Next, we analyse what the person filming saw through their eyes and we automatically tag the content. So, imagine if we filmed a person who was working at home, the content may include tags such as ‘computer’, ‘desk’, ‘office’, ‘remote working’.

If we see a face in the content, we can automatically tag it based on age, gender, and emotion. And similarly, with a brand, if we know about the brand, we can automatically tag logos and asset for organisations. This means that we can create a film based on certain criteria’s, stitch it all together and add soundtracks, pre-rolls etc, in a fraction of the time it usually takes to produce a professional video. We recently created a video for the New York Tennis Open Ladies Finals, they were able to filter content using our technology, creating a mosaic of females in different locations. So, we can be far more tailored - that is the innovation and what we have a patent for!

I can imagine as a company based around events, COVID-19 has presented some significant challenges, how have you overcome this?

Yes, imagine having a tech start-up with the sole product centred around events when there are no events! It wasn’t how we were expecting our 2020 to start, especially as we had some really exciting projects in the pipeline within the wedding industry! After the initial panic back in March, we put our entrepreneurial hats on and thought, well what do people need when they are all at home watching videos?

It was from here that we reached out to sports agencies, thinking they must have the same problem as us, with a business centred on sports but with no fans!

Wasserman (a global sport agency) came back to us, and we immediately realised the synergies and how we can help each other. We signed an exclusive deal with them for 6 months to power their CrowdAmp product, and have since worked on the US Open Tennis in New York, Basketball Champions League in Athens, Dallas Cowboys, San Francisco 49er’s and there are more in the pipeline (which I can’t say right now!).

I guess when the pandemic hit, the entrepreneur in you thinks ‘what can we do now…?’
That sheer determination to do something different was what has accelerated the growth of the company and meant we have much more exposure in the US now than we ever did before.

Pre-COVID, our tech was all about people travelling to events, recording 10 second clips and from the location, date and direction we would be able to use AI to automatically create videos based on certain criteria’s. However, COVID meant nobody was going to one central point where we could collect this data. So, we changed our offering to do more curated content, asking people to send in their content which would later be put into mosaic videos and streamed on screens around stadiums.

We also developed audio streams of cheers for broadcasters and worked on social campaigns with sporting associations such as the San Francisco 49er’s, where fans used the app to upload images and texts, which was automatically generated into a branded video and shown in the stadium. The film can be created in a matter of minutes and includes hundreds of people.

I guess when the pandemic hit, the entrepreneur in you thinks ‘what can we do now…’ That sheer determination to do something different was what has accelerated the growth of the company and meant we have much more exposure in the US now than we ever did before.

We have flipped the challenges on its head and created opportunities! Although with opportunities comes hard work, and where we have new ideas and new features with limited cashflow, it has been difficult to balance this. But it’s all about getting a team who is bought in to what you are trying to achieve – we have probably done 9 months of work in just two months, and that is down to the ‘we can do this’ culture in our fantastic team.

And finally, if you were to give one piece of advice to a tech business just starting out, what would it be?

The number one thing would be to check the market! You might think that you have stepped upon the next million-pound idea, but have you checked that there is a demand for it? Before we started Filmily we went out to our contacts, explained to them what we were going to do and asked if they would see the value in it. We went to over twenty different racecourses, sports clubs, venues, because essentially if they weren’t interested, we knew we couldn’t move forward. Start from the customer and work back!

For us, our customers and users are the best people to come up with the new ideas, we work with them to discuss how the platform could improve and introduce new features. There are always areas to improve!

Andy, thank you for sharing your Filmily story with us and good luck for the South West Tech Awards 2020!  If you would like to find out more about Filmily please visit their website here

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