LONDON — Animation and VFX studio Jellyfish Pictures (www.jellyfishpictures.co.uk), which creates original kids’ content, has opened a new facility in Sheffield. The new studio is a response to the company outgrowing its current location following an expansion to the North of England less than a year ago.
After opening its Northern arm in May of 2019, Jellyfish Pictures saw rapid growth in both its Southern and Northern UK offices. The new studio houses the burgeoning animation team, which has more than doubled in size in the past three months.
As with all other Jellyfish Pictures locations, there is no hardware housed onsite in the new Sheffield studio, which is situated in the city centre within the Wizu Workspace. Operating in a completely PC over IP environment, all technology and pipeline is housed in a centrally based co-location in Hayes. The studio is able to virtualize its distributed workstations through Teradici’s remote visualisation solution, which allows for both flexibility and scalability.
The team working out of Jellyfish Pictures’ Sheffield studio is being overseen by animation director Kevin Spruce. A Hollywood animated feature film is currently in-production.
“Recognizing Sheffield as an area that held great potential for growth in the VFX and animation industries led to the opening of Jellyfish Sheffield early last year,” explains Phil Dobree, CEO of Jellyfish Pictures. “It’s an incredibly proud moment for me, now, to announce our further expansion in the North of England. For it to come about so drastically and quickly, only confirms the hunger for a larger creative industries presence outside of London, of which we are committed to cultivating.”
Dobree adds that none of this would have been possible without the studio’s continued investment in virtual technologies.
“The ability to ramp up as needed and easily move to a bigger facility has been of invaluable worth,” says Dobree. “Casting off the constraints of our on-premise infrastructure has allowed us to not only remain agile and scalable when taking on projects, but also allows us to put talent first. This technology has enabled us to reach new heights, and I can’t wait to see where the next steps take us.”