About
A production studio the size of one person, with the output of a crew.
Ninth Echo makes campaign stills, creator ads and short film for consumer brands, using AI production tools to do work that used to need a location, a crew and a week of daylight.
That is the whole reason the prices on this site are what they are. The constraint on the work is direction, not budget.
Who "we" is
One person. Ian Stewart, working from Totnes in South Devon. The studio says "we" because it is a studio and not a personal brand, but there is no account manager and no handover: whoever reads your brief is the person who makes your images.
Ninth Echo is new, and this site does not pretend otherwise. The work on the Work page is our own brand, built to the standard we sell, because a studio with nothing to show should show something rather than describe itself.
How a job is actually made
The same way a shoot is planned, minus the shoot. The palette, the lens language and the light are fixed before the first frame, which is what makes a set read as one job rather than ten separate images. Your product is composited in from your own photograph. Then the frames are checked against the spec, measured rather than eyeballed, and the ones that fail are remade.
Being straight about the tools
- What it does well
- Putting a real product into a scene that would otherwise need a location, a crew and a day of light. Consistency across a set, once the brand book fixes the palette, the lens language and the light before the first frame.
- What it does badly
- Small print, intricate labels and fine text. Which is why your product is composited from the photo you send rather than regenerated from a description. The label on the shelf stays the label in the image.
- What we do about it
- Every frame is measured against the brand book rather than approved by eye, and the failures are written down. Ten frames of RIME took four days and the record of what went wrong is longer than the record of what worked.
How we work
Five rules, all of them on the page before you pay.
- Fixed scope and a fixed price, both published before you buy. No quotes, no proposals, no day rates.
- No sales call. A ten-question form replaces discovery, and the answers are the brief.
- Two revision rounds included on paid work, stated upfront, with the boundaries written on the offer page.
- Your turnaround starts when the brief is complete, not when you pay.
- Full resolution files, for full commercial use in your own marketing. No usage clock, no renewal fee.
None of this is flexible, and that is the point. A studio that quotes every job separately spends its week on quoting. The rules are what pay for the turnaround.