Frontier VFX is a fully-remote Montreal visual effects studio that began as a department of Outpost VFX in 2019. They split off into their own unit, and the team kept growing.
"When we started at 10, we were small enough that we filled one Google Meet or one Slack call without any real friction. As we started to grow, there was a disconnect between different departments and different units. At the beginning, we felt like a real community. And then as we grew, it became more and more difficult to maintain that community feeling."
So Oliver started looking for something that could keep the studio together as it kept getting bigger.
Oliver wears two hats at Frontier: production operations and culture. When the team started looking at virtual office tools, he tried a few. Some were too simple to fix the culture problem. Others were so gamified that the less tech-savvy half of the team would have struggled to find their way around.
Frontier set Cosmos up across three levels: a main floor where artists sit and work, meeting rooms for departments, and two screening rooms for daily review sessions. The space is customised so the studio feels like Frontier, not a generic office template.
"Cosmos slid right in between. It was customisable and friendly enough that it added that culture aspect we were looking for, but it was also simple enough that any user could just hop on and not feel like they were totally reinventing the way that they worked."
Once the rooms were set up, Oliver rolled it out in a focus group with production first, then expanded to artists. Artists had a logical concern: would Cosmos mean people constantly bumping into their desks all day, or cameras and mics always on?
"It was a logical fear, but the solution was very immediate. All it took was a couple of days of that not happening for people to be like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. Nobody is bothering me all day."
Once the big-brother worry was off the table, the pitch to artists was simpler: they did not have to use Cosmos all day. They just had to stay logged in so the rest of the studio could find them when needed.
"It's not about using it all the time. It's about being there, ready when someone needs it. Stay logged on, set your avatar to focusing, and Cosmos is the quickest way to reach someone when you need them. That became our ethos and it has stuck."
The day at Frontier starts and ends in Cosmos. Everyone is logged on, but how each person uses the space is their call. They pick a status of available, listening, or focusing. Oliver and the leadership do not police any of it.
"All of our team logs on to Cosmos first thing in the morning and any meetings that are scheduled throughout the day will also happen on Cosmos. What happens in between that, we're very flexible. Our team will stay logged on, but they can be set to available and chatting with teammates. They can be set to listening, or they can be set to focusing. We don't police any of that and we feel that's the most effective way to allow for multiple different types of work styles."
"When the meetings happen everyone just pops in. As long as our team is aware and they're held accountable to go to those meetings, there's not really any need to chase people down. Our daily review sessions happen at a set time. I need to be available and go into the screening room to be part of them. These little things have just happened quite naturally."
"Our artists, their primary goal is to make their art, to produce visual effects. So the less time that they spend in meetings, the more that they produce, and the happier they are. Production and supervision on the other hand, a lot of the things that need to be discussed need to be discussed face to face. They're way quicker to resolve in a face-to-face meeting than on a text feed."
Frontier is one of the clearest cases of remote studio culture holding at scale. Cosmos became part of how Frontier runs, not a tool the team has to remember to use. When the team meets in person, the rapport is already there because everyone has been quietly sharing a space for months. The change Oliver did not expect was that Cosmos improved how Frontier onboards new artists too.
"Onboarding into Cosmos has actually helped our overall onboarding process. Our users start their first day walking into a virtual office where their buddy picks them up and chats them through things, and they see visible markers of what their day is going to look like. It's actually streamlined our onboarding process beyond Cosmos."
"There is a feeling in our studio now that if we were to remove Cosmos from our toolkit, there would be a real void. There'd be something missing there. Functionally we'd still have our video calls. We'd still have our calls everywhere else, but there'd be something missing. There's a humanity to it that we'd be lacking."
Oliver Nacey
Production Operations and Culture Coordinator
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