Escape Studios

Revitalising a VFX academy’s digital presence.
Deliverables
UI & UX design
Storyblok
Headless
Web development
SEO
Recognition
Web Guru Awards

Escape Studios is one of the UK's premier VFX, animation and games art training and teaching institutions. It’s been at the forefront of creative education since 2002, supplying the industry with studio-ready talent. We were tasked with designing and building an engaging website that champions accessibility, using Storyblok’s CMS to integrate with existing sales and lead generation software.

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The challenge

Escape Studios needed a website to showcase its courses, products, and events in a far more interactive, engaging, and appealing way. Its existing website catered for two distinct schools - Escape Studios (creative courses) and Pearson Business School (corporate and professional), resulting in a ‘half-way house’ that wasn’t pleasing either audience. It was also built in Adobe Experience Manager which caused issues around workflow processes when making website changes.

The new website had to offer the best possible user experience, with exceptional accessibility. The goal was to ensure students would repeatedly visit the website to find insights, courses, and useful resources. It needed to provide an easy experience for new customers, while being simple for the internal marketing team to update.

Our solution

Known for being one of the UK’s best-rated training and teaching institutions for all things animation, games, and VFX, we incorporated subtle nods to gaming features such as keyboard keys, language, retro buttons, and loading bars that mimic those of computer games. We turned the colours on their head, opting for a darker look and feel with pops of colour, letting the student work take centre stage. 

Now, the Storyblok CMS permits greater autonomy for Escape Studios’ inhouse team, ensuring a simplification of the authoring experience and more consistent site for the customers. Customer journeys, SEO, user experience, and digital accessibility were considered from the start, ensuring Escape Studios’ digital presence is more aligned with its academic competitors and industry partners. Now, the website is more engaging, and it’s far easier for prospective and existing students to easily access and navigate to pages of interest.

Firstly I just wanted to say a massive thank you, to everyone in the team who has helped on this project. The new website looks absolutely amazing and everyone has been incredibly complementary of the upgrade in web experience we are now providing our users.

Cameron Richmond

Website manager, Escape Studios

Escape Studios was looking for a headless CMS that would integrate with Shopify (for sales) and the CRM (for lead generation). Taking these points, and Escape Studios’ rather specific content editing workflow into consideration, Storyblok was the obvious choice. With The Bigger Boat being experts in headless and one of only a few approved Storyblok partners in the UK, Storyblok put us forward to Escape Studios as the agency that could meet their particular requirements.

Andy McCaul

Managing director, The Bigger Boat

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Suite 7, The Watermill
Wheatley Park
Mirfield, West Yorkshire
WF14 8HE

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