The special effect of desktop-as-a-service to the monster makers at Jellyfish Pictures
- Summary:
- The space and power needed to run a fleet of high-end professional workstations was cramping Jellyfish’s style - so the London-based visual special effects (VFX) company decided to try a new, cloud-based approach.
In recent years, Britain has gained something of a name for itself in creating the visual effects (VFX) that have come to dominate blockbuster movies. Among recent Hollywood flicks to use UK-based VFX facilities are ‘Gravity’, ‘Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ and ‘Captain Philips’. Keen to capture an even bigger slice of the pie, the UK government recently bolstered the tax breaks available to filmmakers who choose to spend their VFX budgets in Britain.
If a cash bonanza is on the horizon, one company that hopes to benefit is Jellyfish Pictures, a small but growing VFX house, based in London’s West End, just a stone’s throw away from Oxford Circus.
Since it was established in 2001, Jellyfish has attracted a string of awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), the Visual Effects Society and the Royal Television Society, as well as two Primetime Emmy nominations.
Along the way, its highly talented VFX artists have helped bring to life a host of characters, from the lovable - Neil the Sloth from the Sofaworks TV adverts - to the menacing - the shape-shifting Zygons in the 50th anniversary episode of the wildly popular BBC sci-fi series, Doctor Who.
But it takes a great deal of computing power to create the kinds of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and animation in which Jellyfish specialises.
That doesn’t come cheap and is pretty hard to cram into prime, central London real estate, explains Jeremy Smith, chief technology officer at Jellyfish Pictures.
The HP workstations, equipped with Nvida GPU [graphical processing unit] chips, at which these artists toil each come with a price tag of more than £2,500 [$4,224]. Smith says:
They’re built to take a beating - and we torture them.
The artists use heavy-duty applications such as Autodesk Maya for 3D animation and Adobe professional apps to work on files stored on a large, centralised file server.
Together, this infrastructure takes up room and sucks up power and cooling at an alarming rate, explains Smith. Jellyfish’s central London location simply wasn’t designed for this kind of use:
And the building we’re in right now is at full capacity in terms of the power it can take from the grid.No more electricity will be provisioned and we don’t have physical room to expand, either.
Obstacle overcome
That’s a big obstacle for a growing company like Jellyfish. The company has recently opened a second site in Brixton in south London, where it now has a 4,000 square foot animation studio - but that expansion, in itself, posed challenges. How could staff in Brixton safely access the file server in central London?
Just as importantly, how was Jellyfish to equip the legions of freelancers and contractors it regularly hires on a temporary basis, in order to work on specific projects? Smith says:
If we’re bidding on a job, or better still, we’ve just been commissioned to deliver a new project, there will often be a particular artist, with specific skills, whose talents we need to secure in order to deliver the project. But they may not be in London. They could be based in Birmingham or Liverpool or somewhere else. That’s a big issue in terms of sharing the terabytes of data they need to get work done on files.
It’s a problem that Smith mulled over for some time:
We definitely needed a cloud-based professional workstation that we could deliver to remote users and that would tie in with our own internal infrastructure. I had an inkling that GPU-enabled virtual desktop infrastructures would be viable in the near future - and I knew that, once that technology matured, this was the direction in which I wanted to drive Jellyfish.
Being one of the first VFX houses to embrace this approach, he saw, would bring huge competitive benefits.
The answer came in 2013, in the form of a new ‘Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for GPUs’ service from UK-based cloud provider Exponential-e.
This is based on Nvidia’s Grid technology for high-performance, graphics-accelerated computing power and Vmware’s Horizon DaaS platform for service providers. The virtual desktops, meanwhile, are delivered to Jellyfish artists via Exponential-e’s virtual private LAN service (VPLS).
There’s been no real migration project to contend with, says Smith:
Just an expansion of our existing infrastructure into the cloud, allowing us to reach into Exponential’s data centre and spin up new virtual workstations, as and when they’re needed.
Files remain on servers within Jellyfish’s central London offices, as do its existing workstations. But the benefits of this new approach will be huge, Smith explains:
If staff need to work off-site - they’re at Warner Brothers’ studios in Leavesden, for example - or working on a shoot, they can use a regular laptop with a client downloaded onto it to access their virtual workstation in the cloud.
It will enable staff to work from home and means that the company can get freelancers working on new projects very quickly, also from their own homes:
If we need, say, 30 or 40 freelancers for a set period of time, we can get 30 or 40 workstations up and running in around 10 or 15 minutes.”
We still want to make use of our existing investments in IT, but this will allow us to grow in a more cost-efficient way. We’ll operate in a hybrid model of on-premise and cloud workstations.
In fact, if we need to go into the BBC to show off a project we’re working on for them, we can make changes to the file in the meeting, right there, in front of the client. It blows my mind, if I’m honest, that this sort of stuff is now possible in our business.