Star Wars - Visions (Aardman Animation Studios, Disney+, Lucasfilm) THE LOOK STARTS A NEW ERA


The Look is a high-end colour grading and picture post company, responsible for work on the likes of Fleabag, Landscapers and Sex Education. With productions for all the major linear and streaming providers coming through its suites, high security and agility is of vital importance. So, when CTO Mark Maltby investigated Infrastructure as a Service, the IaaS partner he chose would have to be one The Look and its prestigious clientele could trust.


“We’re no strangers to remote working. In 2016 we installed PCoIP Teradici KVM on all our machines; it gave us more options to move around suites, without being tied to any particular space. In 2017 we set up a successful work-from-home solution, which meant that we weren’t tied to the office at the end of the day when the US got online. We first worked with ERA when we were looking for a new fibre provider and they were recommended by Jellyfish. We took a contract with them for the fibre in 2018 and ERA’s Sean Baker suggested at the time that we could route our internet via the ERA data centre. So remote hosting of our infrastructure had been on the cards, but with all the planning, taking everything offline, and executing it, it wasn’t something we considered lightly. “By 2020, our server room in Margaret


Online suite at The Look, once the MCR eraltduk.com


Street, Soho, had grown up to five racks. We had a mixture of storage, tape decks


for backups, all the servers and the workstations that we use for ColorFront Transcoder, Quantel Pablo Rio, Flame and Davinci Resolve. Then the pandemic hit. When we sent everyone to work from home, those five racks were the only thing running in our office. “We made the decision to go remote


with ERA in late 2020. If something like this happened again, at least the equipment would be in a data centre. There were other factors too, such as environmental management; having a machine room on-prem means you’re responsible for air conditioning. And a lot of that kit is noisy – there was a permanent scream from the machine room. At the time [but given Soho energy costs, no longer] IaaS was more expensive than hosting our own equipment by a few thousand pounds, but we felt that we could potentially make that money from converting the machine room into a rentable suite.


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