Framestore

Framestore was founded in London in 1986 by William Sargent and Sharon Reed, originally as a post-production house serving British broadcast television. The company expanded into feature visual-effects work in the late 1990s and grew into one of the largest UK-headquartered VFX studios; CMC Capital, a Chinese private-equity firm, became majority owner in 2016.

The studio is best known for character-driven photoreal work — the bear in Paddington, the talking animals of His Dark Materials, the photoreal characters of The Lion King (2019) — and for long-form Marvel sequences (the Quantum Realm, Doctor Strange's mirror dimensions, the snap effects in Infinity War / Endgame). Its single most-decorated piece of recognition was Gravity (2013), which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and pushed the studio's pipeline toward fully-CG photographed characters in zero-gravity environments. Earlier Oscar wins include The Golden Compass (2007).

Framestore also runs a large advertising arm (the Coca-Cola polar bears, the John Lewis Christmas spots) and an immersive division working on theme-park rides for Disney and Universal. Its London base is on Charlotte Street; the New York office handles much of the studio's episodic and brand work.