A Vū to the Future
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Diamond View gift will develop talent pipeline
By KILEY MALLARD | USF FOUNDATION
HE FIRST FEW MONTHS OF 2020 were good for Diamond View Studios, a full-service, Emmy award-winning creative video agency based in Tampa. Then the COVID-19 pandemic began. At the time, 80 percent of their work required travel to film on location, which became a problem in the early days of the pandemic. For about two months, founder and CEO Tim Moore said they struggled with how to solve this issue. “We figured out, if we can’t go to the location, let’s bring the location to us,” says Moore, ’11. They started experimenting with filming against virtual backgrounds, a video production technique that was just starting to gain traction. Virtual production replaces the need for filming on location or against a green screen by using photorealistic virtual environments on large LED domes. One of their clients at the time, Jack Daniels, was “enamored” with how realistic the backgrounds looked and how much easier it was to shoot this way versus on a green screen. After successfully working with them and other smaller products, Moore realized they needed to scale up. So in October 2020, Diamond View built a 10,000-square-foot virtual production studio along Fowler Avenue near the USF Tampa campus. “It was a big leap for us, because we essentially rolled the dice with all of the money we had in the business. It was either going to go to the moon or explode along the way,” Moore says. Fortunately, it was the former. The newly christened Vu Studios was soon booking
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UNIVERSITY of SOUTH FLORIDA
clients ranging from Mercedes Benz, Disney and Apple to entertainment artists such as 21 Pilots, Bad Bunny and Enrique Iglesias. NBC’s Today show did a segment on Vū Studios during Super Bowl weekend in February 2021. Now 35,000 square feet, Vū Studios stands as its own sister company to Diamond View Studios, worth an estimated $50 million. “So our new 6-month-old startup business brings in three times more revenue,” Moore says. With their own success in virtual production, Diamond View started looking toward the future. Moore says the biggest challenge in the industry is creating the workforce, as you can build the studios faster than you can train people to operate them. The technology is also so new, there’s no accredited coursework. “Virtual production is a major paradigm shift in the video production industry that will create millions of new technology jobs over the next several years,” Moore says. With more than 60,000 studios worldwide on the brink of this new digital transition, Vū committed to building the workforce of the future by donating $5 million to state universities and colleges over the next three years to build virtual production training programs. While Vū Studios was being built, Moore already envisioned it as a training ground for video production students at USF and other area universities. The original intent was for students to train at Vū Studios whenever the space wasn’t booked for clients, but with all three studios constantly booked solid for several weeks out, they decided it made more sense to build a dedicated space right on USF’s campus. In summer 2021, Diamond View Studios made an in-kind contribution of state-of-the-art virtual production
