VFX


WORKING IN THE CLOUD


Finding the Milk


INTERGALACTIC FOR SKY


The pandemic forced the VFX industry to quickly embrace remote working and cloud rendering. But now it’s here to stay. Michael Burns reports


V 88 televisual.com Summer 2021


isual effects is one of the most innovative sectors of the film and TV industry, so when the pandem-ic


forced the world into lockdown, quick solutions to having to work remotely were much in evidence. It was made simpler by the move to cloud-based solutions, particularly for rendering already adopted throughout the sector. The Mill went full remote very


quickly as lockdown commenced, “thanks to the amazing work of our technology teams in all our offices, from LA to Bangalore,” says global head of software Amaan Akram.


“We utilise a hybrid of cloud and local infrastructure, using each to its advantage for usability and cost. “The biggest upside is added


capacity, and not being tied down to geographical locations for our hiring strategies,” Akram continues. “The challenge is usually making sure there is enough network bandwidth available to the remote talent, and physical distance from a data centre. The latter can sometimes mitigate the benefits of using cloud infrastructure. “For our current needs we keep


our finished job archives on premise,” he adds. “Downloading huge amounts of data from any cloud provider or moving that data across cloud zones can add up in terms of cost, so we aim to strike a balance between what data needs to be globally available versus what we are happy to keep locally stored.” According to Mike ‘Chappers’


Chapman, executive creative director


of The Mill’s London Studio, other issues have arisen around final QC and the general creative process. “We have a studio that is set up for viewing the work for both staff and clients,” he says. “Taking this away and having clients reviewing work on all sorts of different screens, as well as not having teams in the same room for the creative back and forth has been a challenge. We have leveraged tools like Microsoft Teams to help with collaborative working, which has been great, and also given us access to talent globally.” Axis Productions, which has arms


in Bristol (Axis Studios) and Glasgow (Axis Animation) was also looking at remote methods pre-pandemic to hire artists without having them relocate. It had looked at Teradici which allows remote artists to use the power of the GPU in the on-premise workstation. However when COVID hit everyone other facility seemed to have the same


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