LONDON — BAFTA and multi-award winning VFX and animation studio, Jellyfish Pictures (jellyfishpictures.co.uk) has opened a new facility in South London, Brixton. The new studio is home to 200 artists and, in addition to its other four studios spread across South London and Sheffield, will be the company’s official headquarters. In line with the extensive expansion, Jellyfish Pictures has removed all onsite IT infrastructure from its existing sites and moved everything to a co-location, resulting in the facility becoming wholly virtual.
The new studio is designed to promote collaborative work and creative exploration. Spread across one floor, the studio sprawls a total of 100 meters, with over a third of the facility dedicated to staff breakout areas, meeting rooms, client areas and a 4K screening room with Dolby Atmos sound. All meeting rooms have been equipped with the latest Crestron/Extron display systems, allowing users to access a dual network enabling smooth video conferencing experiences in a Trusted Partner Network (TPN) environment, something which previously had been difficult.
“Jellyfish Pictures is a wonderful melting pot of cultures and creatives, so it was important to me I delivered a space where our talent could thrive,” says Phil Dobree, CEO of Jellyfish Pictures. “Something that couldn’t be achieved in Soho, the new space spreads across one long 100-meter floor, encouraging everyone to share tips, ideas and collaborate. We also wanted to use the technology out there to make lives easier so there is more time for creative endeavours.”
With no hardware housed onsite, across any of the five Jellyfish Pictures’ sites, all studios operate in a completely PC-over-IP environment. All technology and pipeline are housed in a centrally based co-location, with all distributed workstations being virtualized through Teradici’s remote visualization solution. Being a TPN-certified studio, the new set up is completely secure, utilizing Pixit Media’s PixStor multi-tenancy container services for audit-compliant secure data separation and isolation.
“We have a visionary CTO in Jeremy Smith, and we were determined to carry on our drive into the cloud, furthering the evolution of our move into virtualisation we started with our Oval studio three years ago,” says Dobree. “Moving out of Soho gave us the chance to get rid of all our remaining on-premise infrastructure and move fully virtual, taking our existing Brixton studio with us. 2019 has been a revolutionary year for Jellyfish, which has included a new brand identity, moving out of Soho, overhauling our IT infrastructure…even living up to our namesake and installing a Jellyfish tank, and we don’t plan on slowing down for 2020.”