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June 16, 2021 – Hollywood, California

Joyce Cox, who has spent the past 25 years producing visual effects for numerous projects including THE JUNGLE BOOK, AVATAR, THE DARK KNIGHT, TITANIC, HARRY POTTER, and MEN IN BLACK III, talks about CURÓ™, the smart alternative to unwieldy spreadsheets, and her collaboration with Thom Miller, the project’s chief architect & developer.

Join Joyce, Thom, and  Don Farr, UST Media Services,  as they discuss:

– How CURÓ simplifies the creation, organization, and management of a VFX budget from pre-production through to final delivery.

– How CURÓ streamlines the bidding process across the studios, production entities, and digital facilities from anywhere in the world.

– How the newly added CURÓ VENDOR provides the tools to establish billing rates, build cost complexity pricing and quickly return bids for clients.

Visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgR3OSSQcxM

“Platform provides VFX producers the tools to secure bids from VFX facilities”

Hollywood, CA, April 14, 2021: UST, a leading digital transformation solutions company, and its digital arm for the entertainment industry, UST Media Services, announced the launch of CURÓ VENDOR, a VFX financial platform that streamlines the bidding process between Producers, Studios, and VFX facilities.
VFX Budgeting is an incredibly time-consuming, inaccurate, volatile process, without a single industry solution or toolset, for both the project producers & their VFX facilities partners. CURÓ simplifies the creation, organization, and management of a VFX budget from pre-production through final delivery, providing a unified web-based system creating, planning, and managing visual effects budgets for any project.

CURÓ VENDOR provides the tools for VFX facilities to receive bid requests for projects directly from producers and create complex estimates of the tasks and time required to design, develop, and create VFX. Vendors can quickly create billing day rates per labor task, facility labor rates by location, facility costs, payroll expense, employee benefits, and much more. CURÓ VENDOR users can apply these billing rates to individual line-item costs on shots, assets, and FX development or create consistent cost complexities that are used over and over again. Once completed, CURÓ VENDOR publishes bids directly to the CURÓ PRODUCER Module, for an easy vendor by vendor bid comparison and analysis by the project producers.

“All facilities, large and small, need to budget the same labor and resource expenses when preparing bids for VFX work. Unifying the bidding process across the industry will save time and increase accuracy, both within the facility and with clients. Particularly so if the client is a Curó Producer user, further simplifying the exchange of highly detailed data,” said Joyce Cox, award-winning VFX Producer and creator of CURÓ.

“We are thrilled to announce the launch of CURÓ VENDOR, as it is a great time to introduce this toolset as Hollywood production moves to recover from the pandemic. We strongly believe that such SaaS approaches improve efficiency and drive profitability in the entertainment industry,” said Jeffrey Lane, President, UST Media Services.

About CURÓ
CURÓ was born out of the entertainment industry’s need for a unified system for the financial planning and management of VFX, the fastest growing segment of the film industry. CURÓ development is based on product-proven best practices and methodologies applied to some of the top-grossing VFX films of the past two decades including “The Jungle Book,” “Men in Black III,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Avatar,” and “Titanic.” VFX Producers have used CURÓ to manage recent shows such as “The Mandalorian”, “American Gods”, “The 100” and the new feature release “Dune”.

For more information about CURÓ or UST Media Services, please contact
Don Farr : Don.Farr@UST.com
+1(708) 717 -8025

CURÓ BidMaker - Create Custom Bid Packages for your vendors.

April 8, 2020 - Hollywood, California

Now that your breakdown & preliminary budget are complete, how do you create and track all your vendor bids?  Managing this process is complex, inefficient and time consuming. And, receiving vendor bid submissions in different formats makes it laborious to compare and analyze.

CURÓ BidMaker streamlines and unifies this volatile process across the studios, production entities, and digital facilities from anywhere in the world. With BidMaker, users create Custom Bid Packages with standard templates for each project for one or more vendors, on a shot-by-shot, asset-by-asset, fx-by-fx, and overhead-by-overhead basis. Returned bids are then imported back into BidMaker for easy comparison & analysis.

 “BidMaker saves time and increases accuracy in the creation, distribution and analysis of VFX bids with multiple vendors. This new toolset allows VFX producers to create custom bid packages for each of their facilities they work with, and then import the completed bid requests into BidMaker for analysis. A producer can review incoming bids from vendors on all aspects of the VFX budget, as well as look at a vendor-by-vendor comparison of the overarching budget.” – Joyce Cox

 

With CURÓ BidMaker:

Create Custom Bid Packages for one or more vendors including:

  • Shots, Misc. Shots, Assets, FX, Facility Overhead and Stereo 3D.
  • Technical specifications including aspect ratio, resolution, framerate, and more.
  • Project Schedule Dates and timelines.
  • Project Materials with descriptions and external links to assets and materials.
  • Bid Specifications with general notes can be created to accompany bid request.
  • Generate and publish CURÓ bid request package spreadsheets for each vendor containing cost and informational aspects of the bid package.

Bid Request Package Import

Import Bid Request Spreadsheets completed by each Vendor into your CURÓ budget. Analysis tools include:

  • Full Comparisons of all aspects of incoming bids from your vendors.
    • Shots, assets, FX, Overhead across all vendors for all frame rate and resolution versions requested
  • View & compare various award scenarios to the production’s preliminary budget estimates.
  • Review vendor questions and comments.
  • Add accepted bids into the budget estimates.

About CURÓ

CURÓ was born out of the entertainment industry’s need for a unified system for the financial planning and management of visual effects, the fastest growing segment of the film industry. CURÓ was developed based on product-proven best practices and methodologies applied to some of the top-grossing VFX films of the past two decades including The Jungle Book,” “Men in Black III,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Avatar,” and “Titanic.” VFX Producers have used CURÓ to manage recent shows such as “The Mandalorian”, “American Gods”, “The 100” and the new feature release “Dune”.

Phase one of CURÓ focused on the VFX producers and studio VFX departments, providing tools for initial breakdown and preliminary budgeting of digital and overhead production costs.  CURÓ BidMaker is available now.  The CURÓ Vendor module with tools for a digital facility's detailed bidding of human and technical resources is slated for release the summer of 2020.

Learn more about CURÓ firsthand and sign up now with a free 30-day trial here.

 

Our March Release has added these new features:

  • Add a Studio Chart of Accounts of your choice to the overhead sections of the budget.
  • Curó 2.1 now supports Multiple Currencies and handles Exchange Rates.
  • Projects are now created with a Base Set of Tags for Assets, FX, and Assumptions.
  • Breakdown: Add Shot Elements to Sequences and Scenes.
  • New Easy Search of each budget to find Shots, Assets, FX, and Overheads in larger projects.
  • Clone existing projects to create a new one.

 

Plus, Newly Released TV/Episodic includes:

Episodic/Series Support

  • Collect Multiple Projects in a series, and link or copy assets, FX, and assumptions between those projects.
  • Episode / Series metadata added to projects in series, including season, episode, and episode notes.

CURÓ was created to simplify the creation, organization and management of a VFX budget from pre-production through final delivery. And now, through our continued collaboration with our clients, we are proud to announce that CURÓ 2.0 is now available.

Here are some of the new features of CURÓ 2.0:

Speed – New User Interface to increase speed & provide faster access to key components.

Stability, Security – Multiple backend security and stability enhancements.

Security – Added the ability for CURÓ Administration to retrieve lost project passphrase, so a lost password no longer means lost work.

New User Interface:

  • Improved Dashboard
  • Faster access to key components, quicker switching between breakdown and budget.
  • Reconfiguration of sidebar to provide a larger workspace.
  • Sequence and Scene Misc. shots moved to bottom of elements for more consistent workflow.
  • Ability to jump to sequences in the Budget section, to mirror breakdown functionality and make it easier to navigate larger, complex projects.
  • Complete redesign of budget overheads to improve both data entry and readability.
  • Ability to add new assets, assumptions, and FX from the budget section.
  • Sticky headers in budget and breakdown for improved usability.
  • Moved budget sub-sections to the header file, for improved usability.
  • New lock/unlock feature allows users to navigate through a Curó project without accidentally making changes to their projects.
  • CURÓ budget areas far easier to navigate through and edit using the tab key.

Episodic/Series Support (Available August 1st)

  • Ability to create and share series between common license users.
  • Ability to collect multiple projects in a series, and link or copy assets, FX, and assumptions between those projects.
  • Episode / Series metadata added to projects in series, including season, episode, and episode notes.

Export – Improved Excel Export.

If you have used CURÓ in the past, or if you would like see CURÓ 2.0, we invite you to sign up and start your new 30 day trial.

Thanks for all of your support!!

Joyce Cox

The VES announced the 2018 inductees into the VES Hall of Fame, the newest Lifetime and Honorary members and this year’s recipient of the VES Founders Award.  All the honorees were recognized at an exculsive, invitation-only reception on Thursday, October 11, 2018 at the Stardust Penthouse at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

Joyce Cox, VES

In the mid 90’s Cox transitioned from producing commercials into the role of VFX Producer for feature films. Since then she has produced thousands of visual effects shots. Her credits include HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, X-MEN 2, THE DARK KNIGHT, AVATAR, MEN IN BLACK III, and most recently Jon Favreau’s THE JUNGLE BOOK. Cox has been the recipient of VES Awards for her work on AVATAR and THE JUNGLE BOOK. In addition, she teaches PRODUCING VFXat the USC School of Cinematic Arts and is working with UST Global Media Services to create Curó, a web-based application for organizing and simplifying the complex process of managing the finances of VFX.