Innovate UK’s Creative Catalyst grant funding has enabled Engine House to produce a five-minute standalone short film and a deeper focus on further research and development.
Big dreams on a small budget
Engine House is an ambitious and award-winning animation studio based in Cornwall, and the company’s true ambition was to create their own animated feature film. Embracing a risk-taking mindset, they decided to pursue it with a super-small budget – about 20% of what a typical animated feature of comparable quality would cost.
The company entered Creative Catalyst, the Innovate UK’s £30 million funding programme for high-potential creative businesses in the UK, with the aim of advancing their real-time animation pipeline.
Their goal was to develop a suite of bespoke tools to streamline the procedural aspects of production, freeing up more time for creative work and enabling them to produce high-quality content on a tighter budget.
Innovate UK support
The direct result of the Creative Catalyst grant funding from Innovate UK was the creation of a short film, a five-minute section of their feature film, The Winning Lottery Ticket, as a proof of concept. This project demonstrated the high-quality work we could achieve on a significantly lower budget and a much shorter timeline.
Natasha Price, Co-Founder of Engine House said: “The impact of the funding was massive. Not only did it mean that we had dedicated studio time to be able to focus on building the tools that we wanted to make. It also left us with a really cool end product of a short film.
Having the film of the back of the funding has given us a lot of different opportunities. We’ve been using it in pitch meetings and we’re talking to much bigger studios who really see the value in what we’re doing so being able to have that Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that we can show to people has been really helpful. We are also entering the project in lots of different awards.”
Beyond providing funding, the Innovate UK support has also allowed the company to focus on research and development. Small creative studios often juggle multiple projects just to keep things moving forward, so having dedicated time for R&D has proven especially valuable.
The future
Natasha added: “We’re now actively looking at financing the feature film and we’re talking to investors and looking at different ways that we can finance this project.”
The company’s long-term goal is to grow into a thriving animation studio. Engine House likes to position itself as the “next Pixar,” aiming to tell meaningful stories that truly resonate with audiences.
The completed feature film will stand as proof of what a small, ambitious studio can achieve with vision and determination. As Engine House puts it, their story is “one of scrappiness, resilience, and a relentless drive to prove what’s possible.”