CHALLENGE: When managing their own cloud infrastructure became too costly and cumbersome, the team at Fivestone Studios sought a new way to work. For this fully remote team, key creatives were consistently taken away from creative tasks to instead fix issues with the self-hosted storage. The biggest challenge was finding an easily scalable, cost-effective cloud-based solution that made it seamless for supervisors to manage projects, add new team members, and work in real-time—like they were used to in-office—in a fully remote setting.

WHY SUITE? Suite simplified Fivestone’s workflow by providing the same instantly accessible centralized cloud storage workflow they had built through a different provider, without the overhead. Suite quickly enabled Fivestone’s team to focus back on creative tasks, and less on persistent infrastructure issues. Features like Suite’s cache system enable seamless access to massive terabyte-scale projects, while Suite Connect also streamlines file sharing globally. The predictable cost of Suite, the intuitive look and feel, and the general ease-of-use all empower Fivestone’s creatives to reclaim time, eliminate bottlenecks, and refocus on the edit.

KEY INSIGHTS:

• Creatives reclaimed 1-2 days per week previously lost to admin and IT tasks
• Fivestone’s global team spans 7+ locations across the U.S. and internationally
• Suite enabled 25+ simultaneous projects with zero bottlenecks
• Suite’s intuitive design reduced onboarding time
• Predictable pricing allowed better cost control compared to other cloud solutions

“Suite allows us to be a team even though we’re not together.”

— Kevin Harkness, Technical Director, Fivestone Studios

Fivestone Studios is built on a culture of creativity. Founded in 1997 by Traylor Woodall, the studio has evolved from a motion design & animation shop into a full service, multi-line agency with ties to every aspect of digital media. From immersive on-site experiences, Augmented Reality, generative visuals, and Virtual Production, to event activations, live entertainment, and custom content, the team at Fivestone leans on the latest technology to maximize their creative efforts, all the while nurturing a collaborative environment between their dispersed creative team.

“I left Country Music Television as a Senior Broadcast Designer,” Woodall reflects. “The two things I wanted were to be able to set culture, and have more control over making great work. I had amazing bosses teach me about the power of great culture, what it does to empower creativity; and I’ve experienced how toxic culture shrivels and kills it.”

Today, Woodall has surrounded himself with a forward-thinking team, consisting of Kevin Harkness, technical director; Ken Conrad, editor/colorist; Rockie Britzmann, associate producer; and a slew of other post production professionals, digital artists, and operations personnel based around the world. Fivestone represents new age media production—and does it all remotely. The company thrives on big multimedia projects with numerous installations, touch points, and outcomes. “Our strength is solving complex problems that need an integrated solution,” Woodall says. “Getting into game engines like Unreal and Unity—it’s crazy stuff. It opened the door to Pandora’s box.”

Going remote: Workflow before Suite

Since 2020, Fivestone has worked remotely with team members scattered across the United States, and a handful of freelancers abroad in Asia, South America, and Europe. Tasked with establishing a creative workflow that enabled numerous multi-faceted projects to happen simultaneously, Fivestone’s post production team spun up its own cloud solution, but over time it became too costly, cumbersome, and prohibitive to the team’s creative process.

“We were managing our own cloud bucket before Suite,” Harkness says. “On paper, it did everything… but you have to manage it, there’s a whole infrastructure to master, and it wasn’t simple to use. We don’t have a dedicated IT team, so Ken and I were balancing that work alongside editing projects. Rocky and other producers at Fivestone would sometimes have to wait days for certain tickets to be resolved. We just couldn’t support it anymore.”

Harkness, Conrad, and the rest of the team also regularly experienced time-sucking file transfers, which took them away from the creative flow state. While it was a necessity at the time, it wasn’t an ideal situation for the duo.

“I spent about a day every week on file management,” Conrad explains. “Even though they were small interruptions, if they came when you were in the middle of something, they could totally derail your creative process.”

Harkness adds, “Collectively, I spent one to two days a week handling requests, fixing things, and transferring files. Sharing a Dropbox link or shipping drives was the best you could hope for, but those come with their own challenges.”

Experiencing slow media transfers, costly overhead, and slow response times when trying to help the team with file management, Fivestone became collectively hindered by its workflow. That’s when the team sought new solutions…

Implementing Suite: Centralized Media on the Cloud

Today, Fivestone’s fully remote creative & post production workflow is entirely based on Suite’s cloud storage. Working alongside 30+ team members, ranging from Tennessee to New York to Brazil, and beyond, all working assets are centralized on Suite for instant access and management from anywhere.

“We work with people all over the world,” notes Conrad. “That’s one of the reasons having remote storage is so beneficial for our team. Right now, we’re sitting at roughly 25 users, and we’re working on more than 10 different video projects; a social media campaign; and a short film. Every project is sitting on Suite right now.”

Now, Suite’s cloud storage platform provides a one-stop overview of every working file, instant access to the latest versions, enhanced security, and a general sense of confidence, especially for those managing projects. In turn, the team at Fivestone is able to refocus on creativity and think less (or not at all) about maintaining access to media.

“With Suite, we don’t worry about network infrastructure,” Harkness says. “Everyone can work from their local workstations, drastically simplifying everything. It’s so easy for someone to spin up Suite on their local machine. We don’t have to deal with any complicated access. Suite does what it says and it just works.”

“Our projects are measured in terabytes,” Harkness adds. “Even that initial hit to the on-demand cache during initial playback is really helpful—sometimes you just need one shot or one Photoshop file, and you don’t really need to pre-cache the entire folder. When sharing media externally, I can just provide the client a Suite Connect link; and when we need a vendor who isn’t fully onboarded to Suite to send files, they can just share them, similarly, with a link.”

Stepping away from the Edit Bay, team management and file access are also affected positively for everyone involved at Fivestone. Easy onboarding process and one-click permissions ensure project managers and producers, like Britzmann, maintain complete control and oversight. “From the producer's side, there's a huge difference with functionality,” Britzmann says. “Suite has been so much better than other platforms we’ve used before. It’s simple: This is how it works, this is how to add people, all you need to do is download the app, and you’re good to go.”

Final Thoughts

Working from the cloud continues to revolutionize the media industry for teams of any size. Now, having experienced the simplicity and connectivity that Suite provides a fully remote or hybrid team, Fivestone’s key creatives note that they'd have a tough time going back to the "old way" of working or switching to different workflow tools at all. For Conrad, Harkness, and the company’s Founder & CEO, Woodall, the benefits continue to make an impact.

“We're so quick I would have a hard time arguing that we need an office and on-site storage,” Conrad says. “It allows us to be wherever we want to be, like spending a week with family and maintaining access to everything. Location doesn’t affect our ability to function efficiently. At this point, it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle.”

“Suite allows us to be a team, even though we're not together,” Harkness adds. “We’re breaking down barriers and borders with this technology. It’s not even about costs at this point—we get to work with who we want. What Suite has done for remote workflows is remove all that friction... it's a game-changer for the media industry as a whole.”

From Woodall’s seat as CEO, the response to Suite has been nothing short of spectacular. “News travels fast, and I hear only good things,” he notes. “We’re typically working to fix fires in the workflow; with Suite that hasn’t happened. At a certain point, Kevin & Ken were spending more time manually building the cloud infrastructure than actually solving cool, creative problems. That’s what gets me excited—I see people spending more time being creative.”

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