Former Blue managing director, Dave Cadle is poaching 45 staff from around six Soho facilities for his new£5.6m post-production facility Envy which opens in the middle of February.
Former Blue managing director, Dave Cadle is poaching 45 staff from around six Soho facilities for his new£5.6m post-production facility Envy which opens in the middle of February.

Cadle, who is set to take the helm as the facility's managing director, added that he already has 25 of these workers under contract and around 80% of the staff will be on site in January. Venture capitalist David Gibbs has been appointed as non-executive director and Technicolor sales executive Dave Bocarro as general manager.

The Rathbone Place site was set up with the help of around 18 private financial backers and is being touted as a comprehensive one-stop shop for broadcast and commercial post-production, boasting 36 operational rooms.

The facility claims to be fully HD equipped and just over£3m has been ploughed into kit for the 16 offline and eight online suites, five audio studios (including three with 5.1 Dolby sound), a graphics suite and a grading suite.

The kit list includes five Digidesigns, three Smokes, a Flame and five Apple Final Cut Pros to facilitate projects with the BBC. Cadle added that he was looking at Quantel equipment and grading kit.

Envy will focus predominantly on broadcast work, in particular light entertainment, drama, documentaries and on-air branding - although commercials will also feature strongly. Cadle revealed that his fledgling facility has already clinched bookings for work on a big documentary and a large drama although details were not disclosed.

The facility is on six floors and occupies 15,000sq ft and Cadle said that he hoped that its size and scale would be one of its main selling points. "It's a new generation of facility. It's all under one roof - clients shouldn't have to walk outside." He added that he wanted it to rank with the likes of MPC or The Mill.

Despite its size, Cadle said client care - or "creature comforts" was a key area of the business, and that Envy had received a lot of input from clients.

Cadle had been managing director at the VTR group facility Blue for nine years before he was replaced by Danny Whybrow in the group's restructure in August 2004. He initially unveiled his plans to open a new facility earlier this year (Broadcast, 21.04.05).

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