OTF expands Bristol facilities to meet demand for high-end factual
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 03 February 2022
Following its 2021 Academy Award for Netflix’s My Octopus Teacher, and setting the stage for creative expansion, the Bristol production arm of factual content company Off The Fence (OTF), has is restructuring its management team and expanding its production capacity.
OffthefenceStaff Karen Meehan 3Feb2022
The expansion of the OTF Bristol production hub forms part of a new creative direction to respond to the evolving needs of its global client base, which spans both traditional broadcasters and the streaming giants. OTF’s new strategy focuses on three content pillars: Yesterday (history); Today (focusing on humankind’s relationship with itself and the planet through the genres of natural history, travel and adventure, lifestyle, crime and impact); and Tomorrow (science) across three business models: OTF Originals, OTF Studios and OTF Fast.

Integral to this strategy is also OTF’s ability to ‘super serve’ by acting as a studio, helping build, schedule and tailor new global FAST channels and using local crews from around the world alongside archive holders, IP financiers, producers of all sizes and platforms and hardware companies across the linear and non-linear spectrum.

As part of the new organisational structure, Karen Meehan (pictured), who has been with the ZDF Enterprises-owned company since 2007, has been promoted to chief operating officer from head of production. In her new role, she will collaborate with OTF’s Amsterdam-based CEO Bo Stehmeier and Bristol-based chief creative officer Allison Bean to set the company’s operational strategy, manage its budget across its four locations in Bristol, London, Amsterdam and Toronto, and help implement organisation-wide goal-setting, performance management, productivity and secure infrastructure for the new three-pillar business model.

Meehan - who has worked on programming for the world’s top broadcasters, including the BBC, PBS, Discovery, National Geographic, ITV and Animal Planet - will oversee the renovation and expansion of OTF Bristol’s facilities. Two new buildings are currently being renovated and, once completed, will increase capacity from six to 14 in-house editing suites, with the possibility of expanding this to 20 suites by repurposing office space.

The project will also deliver an additional 13 offices with room to house 68 people, along with next-generation post-production facilities with ingest stations; online, graphics and grading suites.
Commenting on the expansion, Allison Bean said: “For the last two decades, our Bristol production base has quietly been making some of the best wildlife programming in the world — a fact that was finally recognised last year with the Oscar for My Octopus Teacher. Karen’s appointment and this investment in our facilities will enable us to bring more, and even better, non-scripted storytelling to the world, produced by a more diverse team in a greener, kinder production environment.”