A VISUAL effects company which worked on this year’s Matt Damon movie Jason Bourne is to double its capacity.

Bournemouth-based Outpost VFX announced Paul Francis had joined the business as chief technology officer and that its facilities were expanding.

Mr Francis has 20 years’ experience in the media industry, most recently in medical grade virtual reality applications for use in medical trials.

His first task was to navigate the company through the MPAA Auditors accreditation for the film studio Universal – a process intended to guarantee world-class security for its digital output.

Outpost VFX CEO Duncan McWilliam said: “We are all very happy that Paul has joined Outpost VFX. His experience and knowledge will be invaluable as the company continues to expand.

“He will be taking us forward in developing our GPU (graphics processing unit) render pipeline, data lab and further expansion to 30 more workstations bringing us to 80 available workstations in the next three months.”

Mr Francis said: “As CTO I’m required to oversee and maintain all of the IT infrastructure and am also responsible for researching future technologies that can improve on our already spectacular CPU (computer processing unti)/ GPU render farms, distributed rendering, and software solutions that keep our hugely talented team of artists working as efficiently as possible, and ultimately keep us competitive.

“There are of course many other reactive parts to this job, which means no two days are ever the same.”

The company has also promoted Gez Hixson to head of production as it increases its film slate to include work with Sony and Universal, as well as repeat business with the Weinstein Company and more commercials.

OutpostVFX, based on Richmond Hill, has a 3,000sqft studio housing 30 core artists. It produces 2D and 3D animation and visual effects.

In the past year, its work has included Jason Bourne, Nocturnal Animals, My Beautiful Broken Brain, In the Deep, Under the Shadow and iBoy.

Jason Bourne was the biggest feature the company has worked on so far and was hailed as the company’s first involvement with “tentpole” movies. Its role was to reduce and improve the quality of the blood on Matt Damon’s face in a number of shots, requiring the studio to “rebuild” the star’s face using photos and computer generated imagery.

Mr McWilliam said at the time: “This is another example of us proving that you don’t have to be in Soho to compete with the big boys.”