There’s surely no better way to know your market than by using your own products. Ignite Digi, a small but high-punching outfit designing and manufacturing camera accessories from its base in Hobart, Tasmania, was its own first customer. But it’s been busy adding a host of impressive names to its client base ever since. By Dee Rudebeck.
Ignite Digi was co-founded by cinematographer Tom Waugh and Chris Fox, an aeronautical engineer with 10 years experience in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The company started out as a drone and camera operating team, hiring out their services to film and television productions. However, they found their creativity and vision were being limited by the capabilities of accessories available at the time – so they invented their own.
Self-taught, Fox began producing carbon-fibre camera attachments with a 600mm x 900mm CNC router, before progressing to aluminium. Before long, other people in the industry began noticing their time-saving components via social media and began asking the pair to manufacture parts for them, so they began milling custom orders in Chris’ garage.
Today, while Ignite Digi remains involved in the film and television industry, its core business has turned from primarily filming, to designing, manufacturing and selling accessories to other industry professionals. Ignite Digi make their accessories for high-end cinema cameras and the two leading gimbal brands. A gimbal is a motorised stabiliser for moving cameras, either handheld or mounted on drones, vehicles or cables. Gimbals have only been used in the film industry for the past five or six years.
“Gimbals disrupted the market by enabling people to get shots that previously would only have been possible with exceptionally expensive remote heads,” says Chris. “People are able to get stabilised footage from tracking vehicles that historically required half a million or million-dollar investment. Now they can get virtually the same shot for around $15,000.”
Tom explains it from a cinematographer’s viewpoint: “Because drone work is all about minimising weight, some of our products have unlocked camera and lens combinations that previously had not been possible.”
Ignite Digi’s smallest part begins in price at $115, while the fully linked-in system is around $8,000, including all battery plates and cables.The ecosystem is a range of well thought-out, quick-release parts. According to Tom, now the company’s Sales Manager, it’s an “ecosystem of parts that can be used individually but work better as a whole”.
“In car terms, we are the after-market accessories and performance parts to make the gimbal platform at its most usable,” adds Chris. “Our whole system developed for operators to quickly transition the camera and gimbal package between the different modes [handheld, tripod, drone, remote-controlled buggy] in under a minute. We were the first to systematically solve every element in the process and the system keeps evolving.”
Ignite Digi was an early player in their field. The pair met when Chris was working in materials handling in the mines in Port Hedland, Western Australia, where he had recognised the potential of drones.
“I realised there was an opportunity to take people out of harm’s way by using drones for a lot of activities,” he says. “So I started getting the required licences though the Civil Aviation Authority and tried to establish a business plan.”
Chris was also a keen photographer and a colleague approached him to make a film about a project. However, Chris needed an editor; he was introduced to Tom, who was already working in the film industry. When the pair joined forces in 2014 as the drone and camera team, Tom was only 24 and Chris, at 36, had 20-odd years’ experience under his belt. As a former freelancer, Tom laughs: “So when we both threw ourselves into it full-time, I went into my highest-paying job, while Chris started his lowest.”
They were soon being sent all over the country to shoot films, commercials and TV dramas. One of the first was The Kettering Incident in 2014, the biggest production that year using drones.
Tom explains how they worked: “Chris flew the drone and I was controlling the camera on the bottom separately, in discussion with the film director and director of photography.”
“This is what makes us unique,” chimes Chris. “Between us, we are able to come up with solutions that just a group of film-makers or just a group of engineers wouldn’t come up with, because on a daily basis we are having conversations that cross the boundary between the two. Some people think there is a limitation to how you can film something because the equipment doesn’t exist, but I look at it and think ‘That’s just a case of making that bit of equipment’.”
Upscaling operations
Chris and Tom are now running a busy production line. The company had a stirling 2019 that involved moving out of Chris’s 80sqm garage into a 400sqm workshop, as well as taking on new employees – by March this year, they will have four more full-timers, up from the two co-founders at the beginning of last year. And the bigger space has meant new milling machine purchases.
“We started developing our parts on a basic three-axis vertical mill [Optimill F80 CNC] in 2016,” says Chris. “And as we grew and sales increased, we identified the need to become more efficient in our manufacturing processes. In 2017 we invested in a four-axis verticle mill [LK machinery TC-710 CNC] to speed up our development time and production abilities. In January 2019 we purchased an Okuma Genos 540M and it arrived when we moved into the warehouse. That’s really allowed us to upscale our production in the last 12 months.”
All this has helped Ignite Digi win Manufacturer of the Year at the 2019 Tasmanian Export Awards, while Tom took the inaugural Young Exporter award. And now they are about to expand again.
“We have a new Okuma MB-4000H coming in early 2020, which is similar to the Okuma we have but on steroids,” says Chris.
“Massive steroids,” adds Tom.
The team at Ignite Digi do all their own 3D solid modelling, CAD work and CAM programming, and the new automated horizontal mill will enable them to operate lights-out production, 24 hours a day, seven days a week… “If we can sell enough parts,” laughs Tom.
Chris adds: “The MB-4000H has a 10-pallet pool on it. We should be able to spend a couple of hours loading the machine and then have it run for 24 to 36 hours without much trouble. It depends on the size of the part as to how many it will make – but basically a lot. We’re expecting that machine to more than double our capacity.”
“The Okuma will allow us to manufacture each incremental component for the accessory together in a single run – and this is game-changing because some of our accessories have six or seven different parts we need to manufacture for a single assembly. Previously, we’ve had to batch manufacture those parts individually and in large quantities, which is extremely time-consuming.”
The machine is a $750,000 investment, with all the set-up costs. Other specs include a 15,000rpm spindle and 146 tool magazine.
“The Okuma MB-4000H is a giant leap for us on a productivity and investment level,” says Tom. “It’s more valuable than all the other machines put together – and a bit.”
The rise in production comes after the team’s efforts to grow their market and brand awareness have paid off. The pair put the turning point down to attending their first ever trade show – the Cinegear Expo in Los Angeles in 2018 – where they won a technical award, jointly taking the Best Camera Accessory. Tom says: “We were competing against all the big, multi-million dollar outfits.”
The personal relationships developed at the Cinegear show also proved crucial because 50% of their customers are based in the US.
“We were literally meeting our customers for the first time in person. Business from Australia is only 2%, and in terms of Tasmania we are our only customers, so we don’t get much face-to-face.”
They have also entered the European market, and recently attended the IBC Expo in the Netherlands.
“Our social media journey has been a big part of our success, but the trade show probably legitimised us,” says Tom. “Customers saw us as real people, not just a faceless company on the internet. And they saw that we manufacture our own product line.”
It’s a line the pair are continually refining through their own experience, which has not been without its challenges.
“We’ve sunk a few drones over the years, with expensive cameras on them,” says Chris. “Both were recovered thankfully, but that’s not an easy day at the office.”
Did they still work?
“No,” he laughs. “But it makes the insurance claim easier.”
It’s this process of trial and error in the field that gives Ignite Digi their edge.
“At the same time that we’re working on concept, we are also working on how we will make the part,” says Chris. “Having that super-tight link between the design aspect and the machining aspect is the key advantage for us.
“We’re investing in advanced workholding to enable flexible manufacturing within the MB-4000H. We will have our entire range of products being made on the machine in the course of a 24-hour period if we want to.”
This will allow them to be more responsive to orders and potentially be able to hold lower inventory levels, which would make a huge difference given the exceptional logistical challenges they face being based in Tasmania. There is no technical support available locally for their work. Even basics, such as raw materials and tooling supplies, are non-existent.
“We have a three-week lead time for materials, then we have to get our parts anodised in Victoria at the end, and that’s a two-week turn-around,” says Chris. “So we have five weeks more to worry about in our logistics pipeline than companies in Melbourne or Sydney or LA.”
But it was also this isolation that fostered their ingenuity. Chris explains: “If you consider shooting a film in LA, one rental house there would have more cameras than all of Australia, so when they need an extra camera to go on the gimbal and one to be used handheld, they’d just go and hire another. But in Tasmania there was one camera and we had it, so we had to be creative about how to best use it. That was the catalyst to create our ecosystem to speed up the onset workflow.”
Big-name customers
Despite the geographic disadvantage, Ignite Digi still has the media teams at Apple, Sony, Uber and Telsa contacting them for kit.
“When I got the email from Apple, I thought it was a scam at first,” says Tom. “I emailed the guy and asked technical questions to see if he was legitimate. We checked his address at Infinite Loop in California and he replied with the correct technical answers. He’d found us because someone he’d worked with had our components. Having people from the biggest companies in the world buying our parts blew our minds.”
And while the pair are still working on big Australian productions such as The Gloaming (currently screening on Stan), their parts have been used on Marvel films, Disney’s new Mulan, and various Netflix series internationally.
“Through our manufacturing, we’re remotely working on some of the biggest film sets in the world by virtue of our design and thought process,” says Tom.
Current projects include developing accessories for a radio-controlled car that can attach a gimbal for creative tracking shots. The other focus is implementing automation systems to accompany the Okuma MB-4000H’s arrival, to ensure Ignite Digi can reliably make its high-quality components from day one.
“We’ve invested in CAMplete TruePath verification software as part of the preparation,” says Chris. “We have a fully realistic 3D model of the MB-4000H, and with the software, we virtually run the machine with our designs and 100% verify that the operation will be successful prior to manufacturing. In terms of collision avoidance and improving our process, we’re able to model the exact behaviour of the machine.”
Tom says this is already informing purchase decisions about what workholding and tools they need: “Basically, Chris has started using the machine with our designs before the Okuma arrives.”
The business will no doubt evolve again now.
“When drones were new, we helped pushed the limits of storytelling,” says Tom. “Sometimes we worked with a director who had never used a drone and it was satisfying to discover new ways to tell the story or capture a shot. But now with the sales and support, I really enjoy helping people to solve problems and push their limits of storytelling.”
Their ambitions for the future include expanding into more advanced manufacturing technology. Chris wants to add a five-axis machine to their arsenal … “and maybe go on holiday one day”.
For Tom, it’s also about fostering a community of support for professionals using gimbals. He says that, because they are relatively new tools, some directors refuse to work with gimbals after one bad experience on set: “We want to break down those barriers so people know it’s not like it was five years ago.”
Tom recognises that, like all businesses, things can go wrong, and Ignite Digi immediately sends the customer a replacement part before waiting for theirs to be returned, as most manufacturers do, because “if you’re in the middle of a film shoot, that’s not going to work”.
“It’s a risk we take and an expense we wear, but it’s part of our servicing and pricing,” he explains. “That’s how we would want a company to support us, so that’s what we do.”
That ethos of supporting their customers seems to be refelected in Ignite Digi’s relationship with suppliers such as Okuma. When Chris was sourcing milling machines, he approached a lot of the big players, but he says it was Okuma who took the time to really engage, even though Ignite Digi was just two guys in a garage at the time.
“That resulted in us buying the first Okuma, which has been outstanding, and now lining up a very big investment with the new one. It was hard to go past them.”
It sounds like something Ignite Digi’s customers might say about Tom and Chris and their team.