Boris FX

About Boris FX

Boris FX is an Academy Award-winning developer of visual effects and post-production plug-in tools used across film, TV, and video editing. The Boris FX Suite includes Sapphire, Continuum, Mocha Pro, Silhouette, SynthEyes, CrumplePop, Optics, Particle Illusion, Sequoia, Samplitude, and Music Studio, covering visual effects, compositing, image restoration, titling, color grading, rotoscoping, image stabilization, 3D camera tracking, and audio production.

Boris FX offers 12-month educational licenses to faculty and full-time students enrolled in film, video, broadcast, VFX, or multimedia programs at accredited colleges and universities. The license covers the full Boris FX Suite and is available to eligible academic users for the low cost of $5.

Challenge

Boris FX has long offered discounted software to students with the simple goal of getting their tools into students’ hands early, so that when they land their first job, Boris FX’s products are the ones they already know and reach for.

We want students to walk into their first day on the job and ask where our products are.

Brian Fox, Chief Marketing Officer, Boris FX

Manually verifying student eligibility created a bottleneck. The process often took longer than students were willing or able to wait, leaving Boris FX’s support inbox filled with frustrated messages from students who needed access to the software for their projects. Because each case required individual review, student-related support requests were far higher than the rest of the customer base, consuming an outsized amount of staff time for a program intended as a goodwill gesture rather than a liability.

It all sounded great in theory, but we were making a negative first impression on the most impressionable of potential customers.

Brian Fox, Chief Marketing Officer, Boris FX

By his own account, the team was seriously weighing whether to shut the program down entirely. The opposite of what a program built to earn long-term loyalty should be doing.

Solution

Boris FX evaluated internal solutions like dedicating more headcount to manually review submitted documents or handing faculty a spreadsheet of codes to distribute to students themselves. Neither of these options was satisfactory. Boris FX runs lean with a small team that wears multiple hats, and the product suite was going to keep growing. Any solution that didn’t scale with the business was one they didn’t want to pursue.

This just plugs into our existing purchase workflow and can scale. So, it just made sense to us.

Brian Fox, Chief Marketing Officer, Boris FX

During a conversation with one of their partners, the Boris FX team learned about the Proxi.id verification service. This partner had similar problems with scaling their academic program as their company grew, which led them to Proxi.id.

Onboarding was great — it was a very light lift on our end. We estimated it would take a couple days of part-time dev work, and it took under half a day to get things up and going.

Brian Fox, Chief Marketing Officer, Boris FX

Getting started with Proxi.id was easy as the service plugged into Boris FX’s existing purchase workflow. The company budgeted a couple of days of developer time for the integration, but with a sandbox environment for testing, it only took half a day. From there, verified academic users moved straight into the same purchase flow that all other Boris FX customers use.

Results

Almost immediately after implementing the Proxi.id solution, Boris FX saw a meaningful positive impact on their academic program.

• Turnaround time: A manual process that could stretch past the promised 14 days became near-instant. This increased student satisfaction and conversion rates.
• Support load: Student-related support requests fell right in line with Boris FX’s expectations.
• Staff time recovered: Working hours once spent on manual document review are now spent on higher-value work.

All of the problems from the manual process went away.

Brian Fox, Chief Marketing Officer, Boris FX

Conclusion

Automating verification didn’t just fix a support problem, it frees up more room for Boris FX to focus on the entire student lifecycle. Verified students get access to the full suite while they’re enrolled. When they graduate and become ineligible for the academic offer, Boris FX offers a 50% discount to ease the transition to a paid license, with options to cross-grade into just the single product they use professionally. It’s a deliberately soft landing, designed to keep former students as customers rather than losing them the moment school ends.

This long-view thinking runs through everything Boris FX does with its academic program, from supporting faculty who are trying to keep pace with product updates, to sponsoring student filmmakers and festivals. Getting verification right removed the one piece of friction that was undermining all of it.

That’s where Proxi really helped us, they removed the distraction of manual verification and allowed us to focus on the bigger picture.

Brian Fox, Chief Marketing Officer, Boris FX