How VP Studios Get Built
Founding Capital Determines Everything That Follows…
Every virtual production facility in the world was built through some form of public-private partnership. The only question is which model — and that founding logic determines who gets access, whether education or commerce leads, how sustainable the whole thing turns out to be, and ultimately, who benefits.
Across Belfast, Savannah, Madrid, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Windsor, four distinct models have emerged. None is inherently superior — each reflects the economic realities and institutional cultures of its context. But understanding them is essential for anyone trying to build a VP facility in a developing economy, where the capital question is also, inevitably, a development question.
Four Models of VP Studio Development
The taxonomy below is derived from how facilities are actually being built worldwide. The models differ along three axes: who provides the capital, who operates the facility, and what the educational mandate looks like.
| Model 1 Government Builds It, University Owns It Public infrastructure investment funds the capital. A university owns and governs the facility. A commercial operator is tendered to run the business. Education and R&D are embedded by design. Studio Ulster, Belfast | CoSTAR Network, UK | Model 2 Commercial Studio Embeds in the College A commercial VP company builds and operates a studio inside an educational institution. Regional skills funding offsets the capital. The facility serves both students and paying clients on a shared schedule. CUBE Studio / Windsor College, UK | MR Factory / The Core School, Madrid |
| Model 3 University Builds Its Own, Opens to Industry A university funds and builds the VP facility primarily for its students. Commercial productions can rent the stages, but student involvement is mandatory on every booking. Revenue supports operations. SCAD, Savannah & Atlanta, USA | Model 4 Philanthropic or State Capital Into Education A charitable trust, national skills fund, or government agency provides the capital specifically for educational infrastructure. The facility is built to serve students and upskill professionals, with commercial use as a secondary function. HKDI / Shaw Studios, Hong Kong | Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore |
Model 1: Government Infrastructure Investment
Studio Ulster, Belfast • CoSTAR Network, UK
Studio Ulster is the most ambitious example of this model anywhere in the world. The facility represents a £72 million investment — part-funded through the Belfast Region City Deal — developed by Ulster University in partnership with Belfast Harbour Commission and supported by Northern Ireland Screen. It opened in mid-2025 as a 75,000 sq ft campus integrating three ICVFX stages, Europe’s tallest motion capture stage, volumetric capture, and full post-production facilities.
The partnership structure is the key. The government provided infrastructure capital (£25.2 million from the City Deal). Belfast Harbour — a Trust Port that reinvests revenue into regional benefit — provided the site within its existing studio campus (having invested over £100 million in the broader Belfast Harbour Studios development). Ulster University provides the institutional framework, governance, and educational pipeline. And Northern Ireland Screen provides the screen industry strategy and policy alignment.
Crucially, rather than operating the commercial business itself, Ulster University issued a public tender for a world-leading production company to develop, install, and operate the commercial side of the facility. The university owns the infrastructure; a commercial partner runs the business. This separation is deliberate — it ensures commercial viability while protecting the educational and R&D mandate.
| Capital Source – Belfast Region City Deal (£25.2M), Belfast Harbour Commission (site + co-investment), Levelling Up funds, Ulster University, AHRC/CoSTAR (£75.6M for national R&D network). Total investment: £72M for Studio Ulster alone. | Ownership & Operation -University owns infrastructure. Commercial operator tendered separately. R&D centre (CoSTAR Screen Lab) embedded within the facility. Educational pipeline through Ulster Screen Academy — VP training suite on Belfast campus feeds graduates directly into the commercial facility. | The Logic – The capital is explicitly non-recoupable — regional infrastructure investment, like building a road or a port. ROI measured in jobs, productions attracted, tax revenue, and skills development. The VP facility is economic development policy enacted through creative infrastructure. |
Model 2: Commercial Studio Embeds in College
CUBE Studio / Windsor College, UK • MR Factory / The Core School, Madrid
In this model, the commercial partner is the driving force. A VP company with existing expertise, clients, and revenue decides that co-locating with an educational institution serves both parties — the company gets a subsidised facility and a talent pipeline; the institution gets industry-grade infrastructure it could never fund alone.
CUBE Studio — a London-based VP company in the Vū global network — partnered with Windsor College to build the UK’s first VP studio for 16–18 year olds. The studio sits physically on the college campus, funded in part through the Berkshire Local Skills Improvement Plan, a regional workforce development mechanism. The facility serves students during teaching hours and commercial clients outside them. CUBE’s CEO, technical directors, and crew operate the studio for both purposes — there is no artificial separation between the “educational” and “commercial” sides.
In Madrid, MR Factory operates an almost identical model with The Core School. MR Factory’s CEO and technical leads teach on the programme. Their commercial projects become teaching material. Their studio is the classroom. The result: 100% graduate placement. Municipal governments in the Madrid region offer 45–50% scholarship programmes for residents — direct public subsidy flowing into private creative education through the local skills pipeline.
| Capital Source Private -investment from the commercial partner, offset by regional skills funding (Berkshire LSIP in UK, municipal scholarships in Spain). The educational institution provides the site and student body. Capital requirement is significantly lower than Model 1 — studios are smaller and purpose-built for the commercial partner’s workflow. | Ownership & Operation – The commercial company builds, equips, and operates the studio. The college provides the building, utilities, and students. Revenue from commercial bookings flows to the company; the college benefits from an industry-grade teaching facility at minimal capital cost. Staff often serve dual roles — teaching and producing. | The Logic – The commercial partner’s presence is the education. There is no gap between what students learn and what industry needs because the same people, doing the same work, in the same facility, are both. It is proximity taken to its logical conclusion — the studio and the classroom are literally the same room. |
Model 3: University Builds, Opens to Industry
SCAD, Savannah & Atlanta, USA
The Savannah College of Art and Design invested in two LED volume stages across its Georgia campuses — 60 x 16 ft curved LED walls with 38 x 20 ft LED ceilings — making them the largest VP stages at any academic institution in the United States. The stages were designed in collaboration with Meptik, an XR studio co-founded by a SCAD alumna, and are powered by Disguise xR technology. SCAD is a private, nonprofit university enrolling over 16,000 students from more than 120 countries.
What makes SCAD distinctive is its non-negotiable educational mandate on commercial use. Professional productions — films, commercials, branded content — can rent the stages, but student involvement is mandatory on every booking. The university exists, as its leadership puts it, “entirely for the benefit and education of our students, and any interaction must present meaningful learning opportunities for them.” The ideal scenario is a full professional production shooting over an entire academic quarter, with students interning under faculty supervision.
The LED volume has had a powerful integrative effect across disciplines. Film, animation, game design, production design, sound design, and acting students all collaborate on VP shoots — with the volume described as acting “almost like a center of gravity” that pulled departments together in ways live-action production rarely achieves. Through the university’s SCADpro programme, students have created VP content for Fortune 500 companies including Epic Games and WWE.
| Capital Source Private – institutional investment, funded through tuition revenue (SCAD tuition is approximately $40,000/year). The VP stages are part of an 11-acre, multi-phase expansion of Savannah Film Studios including a Hollywood-style backlot, soundstages, and post-production facilities. This model requires a wealthy institution with a large, fee-paying student body. | Ownership & Operation – The university owns, operates, and controls everything. There is no external commercial partner — industry accesses the facility on the university’s terms. Faculty run the stages; industry professionals are invited in as collaborators, mentors, and clients, but never as operators. The institution retains complete control over educational outcomes. | The Logic – Education comes first. Commercial revenue is welcome but subordinate — the facility exists to produce graduates, not content. This model works where the institution is wealthy enough to absorb the capital cost without external subsidy, and confident enough to impose its educational mandate on commercial clients. |
Model 4: Philanthropic/State Capital Into Education
HKDI / Shaw Studios, Hong Kong • Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore
In Hong Kong, the Design Institute opened a 9,000 sq ft VP studio at Shaw Studios — the historic film facility funded through the Sir Run Run Shaw Charitable Trust. The studio is equipped with the largest Samsung microLED display in Hong Kong, disguise technology, and ARRI cinematography and lighting systems. It serves both HKDI students and industry professionals, with the explicit purpose of nurturing VP specialists and elevating local production standards. The philanthropic legacy of Shaw Brothers — one of the most important studios in Asian cinema history — provides both the physical infrastructure and the cultural legitimacy.
In Singapore, Nanyang Polytechnic launched its BeyondReality Studio in January 2025 — opened by the Senior Minister of State for Digital Development. The facility provides final-year diploma students with hands-on VP experience while also offering continuing education courses for working professionals, supported by SkillsFuture, Singapore’s national workforce development fund. The model is straightforward: the state funds the infrastructure as part of national human capital development; the polytechnic operates it for both pre-employment and mid-career training.
| Capital Source – Charitable trusts (Shaw), national skills funds (SkillsFuture Singapore), or direct government education budgets. The capital is designated for educational infrastructure specifically — not economic development broadly. This produces smaller, more focused facilities compared to Model 1. | Ownership & Operation – The educational institution owns and operates the facility. Industry access is permitted but not the primary mandate. In Hong Kong, the Shaw Studios relationship provides the production ecosystem around the educational facility. In Singapore, the state’s involvement ensures alignment with national workforce priorities. | The Logic – VP capability is treated as a national skills priority. The investment is human capital formation — training the workforce the creative industries need. Commercial revenue is incidental; the return on investment is measured in graduate employability and industry readiness. This model works in economies with strong state intervention in workforce planning. |
Comparing the Models
| Dimension | Model 1: Govt Infrastructure | Model 2: Commercial Embed | Model 3: University-Led | Model 4: Education Capital |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capital Scale | £72M+ (massive) | £1–6M (modest) | $10–50M+ (large) | $1–10M (moderate) |
| Who Funds | Regional/national government + co-investors | Commercial partner + regional skills funds | University (tuition revenue) | Trust / state education budget |
| Who Operates | Tendered commercial operator | Commercial partner | University | Educational institution |
| Education Mandate | Embedded R&D + skills pipeline | Industry teaches through practice | Education first, commerce second | Workforce development priority |
| Commercial Revenue | Primary sustainability mechanism | Core business of commercial partner | Supplementary, on university terms | Incidental |
| Replicability | Requires major govt commitment | Highly replicable | Requires wealthy institution | Requires philanthropic/state will |
| Exemplar | Studio Ulster, Belfast | CUBE / Windsor College | SCAD, USA | Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore |
Where South Africa Sits — and What DeepSouth Proposes
None of these models transplants directly into the South African context. We don’t have a Belfast Region City Deal mechanism. Our universities cannot fund VP infrastructure from tuition revenue. We lack the scale of national creative industries investment that underpins CoSTAR. And while philanthropic trusts exist, they rarely invest in production infrastructure at the scale required.
But we have equivalents — and the DeepSouth initiative is designed to draw on all four models simultaneously.
| What we take from each model : From Model 1 (Studio Ulster): The principle that VP infrastructure is a legitimate target for development finance — non-recoupable investment in national creative capability. In South Africa, the Industrial Development Corporation and Development Bank of Southern Africa fulfil this role. The capital is not a loan to be repaid from box office returns; it is infrastructure investment in a strategic economic sector. From Model 2 (CUBE/Windsor, MR Factory/Core): The operating logic — a commercial partner whose presence in the facility is the education. Commercial bookings bring industry professionals into direct contact with students. The same facility, the same equipment, the same projects serve both purposes. This is the proximity principle that drives our educational model. From Model 3 (SCAD): The mandatory student-involvement policy on commercial bookings. Every production that uses the DeepSouth facility will include student interns as a condition of access. This is not charity — it is how the educational mandate is protected within a commercially active facility. From Model 4 (HKDI, Nanyang): The recognition that VP capability is a national skills priority. South Africa’s film and television industry faces a documented skills crisis. The MICT SETA, National Film and Video Foundation, and provincial film commissions have explicit mandates to address this gap. DeepSouth positions VP training as human capital development — not a luxury, but a strategic necessity. | proposed/negotiable hybrid model : The DeepSouth Model DeepSouth proposes a multi-institutional, development-financed VP network across three South African universities — Wits (Johannesburg), UWC (Cape Town), and CPUT (Cape Town) — with the following structure: Capital: Non-recoupable investment from development finance institutions (IDC, DBSA), private trusts (Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, Anglo American Chairman’s Fund), national and regional film commissions (NFVF, Gauteng Film Commission, Wesgro), and international development partners. Sites & Services: Universities provide premises, security, parking, utilities, and institutional framework — in-kind contribution that significantly reduces the capital requirement. Operation: A deliberate educational-commercial split. Commercial bookings generate third-stream income for operational sustainability. Student internships on commercial projects are mandatory — not an add-on, but a condition of every booking. Education: Full-spectrum — from undergraduate integration through honours/masters/PhD creative practice research to industry short courses and micro-credentials via Wits Plus. Not a single programme, but a complete pipeline. Development Mandate: Serving both halves of South Africa’s creative economy challenge — producing globally competitive local content and maintaining attractiveness as an international production destination. |
The argument to funders is straightforward: every comparable facility in the world was built with public or philanthropic capital. The question is not whether such investment is appropriate — Belfast, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Madrid have all answered that. The question is whether South Africa will make the same commitment to its own creative industries, or continue to watch the gap widen.
Research compiled from public sources including Ulster University, Northern Ireland Screen, Belfast Harbour, SCAD, Meptik/disguise, CUBE Studio, British Cinematographer, Nanyang Polytechnic, HKDI/VTC, and The Core School Madrid. Last updated March 2026.