A big part of us being able to do our stuff is that the boring stuff is taken care of.
Offset Films is a small studio with big ambitions. For a long time, the whole operation lived inside one founder's head: how to scope a shoot, how to script it, which questions to send a client, where each project had got to. That worked while the team was tiny, though it left the business leaning on a single person and juggling a previous CRM, the software a company uses to keep track of its customers and deals, alongside scattered notes and spreadsheets.
Moving to Kinabase gave Offset Films one shared home for the lot. Today, the studio plans productions through clear stages, keeps a proper crew database, and holds equipment records that get kit into secure sites in a fraction of the time it once took.
About Offset FilmsOffset Films is an award-winning video and film production company based in Wickham Market, Suffolk, working across East Anglia and the wider UK. For more than a decade the studio has created cinematic content for businesses, charities, schools, and the public sector, covering everything from promotional and testimonial films to live streaming, drone work, photography, and narrative pieces. The company was named Best Film Production Company, East Anglia, at the UK Enterprise Awards 2022.
The studio is run by two owners, who merged their separate production businesses into one, and it prides itself on a transparent, end-to-end service: clear packaged pricing, full pre-production planning, and professional shoots. Offset Films describes its mission as helping every organisation tell its story in a way that drives real, long-term growth.
The ChallengeBefore Kinabase, the studio faced a familiar small-business struggle, with plenty of knowledge, and all of it locked in the wrong places. Everything depended on one person. The founder held the whole process in his head, which quietly capped how far the business could grow.
The whole sticking point was me, because everything was in my head.
Around that single point of failure, three problems compounded:
Offset Films first met the Kinabase team at a networking event in Bury St Edmunds. Nathan, the studio's other founder, came away struck by how much the platform could link together and automate. When Laurence set it up, he leaned on tutorial videos, a hands-on session with the Kinabase team and their ongoing support to rebuild the framework he had grown in his old tool, then shape it around how the studio actually works.
The platform felt approachable from the start. Nathan found it "quite intuitive, but it's also really easy to do anything with."
Pricing landed close to what the studio had paid previously for a system, but Kinabase had more included, and the founder had it fully implemented in roughly eight to ten weeks while still running the day-to-day jobs.
The SolutionMultiple pieces of information now live in Kinabase. A standard operating procedure is simply a written recipe for how the team does a recurring task, so anyone joining can follow it rather than guessing.
With the equipment inventory held and ready, the studio cut its first entry time at a secure site from an hour and a half down to around twenty-five minutes.
Having this information collated, yes, it takes some time at the start, but once it's there, it's future proofed. It's one space, rather than having 30 different spreadsheets that are hidden all over the place.
The change shows up in small, practical wins that add up. Kit clears security in a quarter of the time it once did, because the paperwork is already done and accurate. The studio can say yes to two jobs in a day rather than choosing between them. Repeat work arrives through timely follow-ups instead of slipping through the cracks, and the founders spend less time firefighting and more time filming.
The wider business has grown strongly over this period. Laurence credits Kinabase with being the calm underneath the growth of the company: a central structured space that keeps the operation streamlined as the team looks to scale.
When we asked if they would recommend Kinabase, they answered that they already had:
Definitely would recommend Kinabase. We have recommended it to a couple of local small businesses. Your team was fantastic.
Offset Films shows what happens when the groundwork is done well. Get the process out of your head, into a shared system. The benefits appear when scoping a shoot, building a script, securing freelancers and planning multiple shoots in a day. Kinabase makes room for the work that matters which, for Offset Films, means more time behind the camera, telling other people's stories.
To see Offset Films' work, please visit their website.
