Check out Atomic Fiction’s work on Flight, Star Trek Into Darkness and other movies. Watch the new demoreel from this outstanding studio…
Atomic Fiction has posted a new demoreel, showcasing its work on movies like Flight and Star Trek Into Darkness.
Flight was recently rendered entirely using the Cloud: “For Flight, we were one of the beta testers working with Zync, and so it was a great opportunity for us to get our hands on this new technology that we really believe is going to change the game for everyone,” says Atomic Fiction’s Ryan Tudhope. Find out more after the demoreel
Watch Atomic Fiction’s new demo reel
Taking Flight to the Clouds
Atomic Fiction’s Ryan Tudhope and Zync’s Todd Prives took to the stage for a talk explaining their experience of rendering Robert Zemeckis’ Flight entirely in Amazon’s EC2 cloud at FMX in April.
Flight is an interesting case study for the VFX industry to look at. The company had to find smart ways to cut costs, but realised that the people they work with are the most important asset they have. “As a VFX supervisor, if I don’t task the shot properly with the right person, then it doesn’t matter how good I am, the shot just is not going to turn out very well, so we realised at an early age in our supervising careers that people are the most important thing, and so we didn’t want to cut corners there, but we had to find ways that made us competitive in the industry,” Tudhope continued. And so the company reached out to Zync who was developing this technology.
Pay as you go
Zync’s technology meant that even this small company could access an ILM-sized renderfarm. So how does it work? The renders go from your iMac at your desk up to the cloud, and the render goes from the cloud back to your local server. As artists you wouldn’t really know you’re using this, it works just like you’re using your local render machines.
“As a business that’s a really incredible thing, as there’s no hardware sitting around in a server room just depreciating, we don’t have to air condition it, we don’t need to hire people to manage it, we don’t have to worry about the fact that in three years it all needs to replaced – all that goes away. It’s a complete game-changer.”
And Atomic Fiction only paid for what they used. The side benefits of this virtual process is that it’s the same price for a faster turnaround, and so you can throw more machines at a job and get it done faster, which saves you waiting around for it. “The quicker iterations, and the ability to see your work faster; having that interaction, is huge,” said Tudhope.
Optimisation
Another interesting benefit was that all of the artists suddenly realised that the company was paying for rendering. “Of course, all artists know that we’ve always been paying for rendering, but in a traditional studio the costs are a bit more hidden, but our artists could see that this was a true expense for the company and so they started to optimise their scenes.”
This case study goes some way to prove that you can cut production costs and still maintain a high level of artistic quality, by rendering images in the cloud.
Music credit: Pumpin Blood, No No No