SEATTLE — Amazon Web Services, Inc. (aws.amazon.com), has announced that Weta Digital (www.wetafx.co.nz), in Wellington, New Zealand, is leveraging the performance of the cloud to create a new, cloud-based visual effects workflow. This workflow includes a set of technologies for VFX artists that will underpin the studio’s global expansion, accelerate key portions of film production, and expand the studio’s New Zealand operations, enabling its team of artists to collaborate on visual effects remotely.
In the past 25 years, Weta Digital has brought to life some of the most memorable worlds and characters in film, including Middle-earth and Gollum in New Line’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Na’vi and beautiful landscapes of Pandora in Avatar. Over the course of this multi-year deal, the studio will migrate the vast majority of its IT infrastructure to AWS to support a pipeline that includes 100 proprietary tools and its LED-stage virtual production service. Weta Digital will also use AWS to produce and render original content from the newly-announced Weta Animated, and deliver on its multi-year movie slate.
Leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure and AWS services, including compute, storage, security, machine learning and analytics, Weta Digital can spread its workloads more efficiently around the world, freeing up talent and resources to continue to create high-end visual effects, and gain the flexibility to render VFX scenes remotely, wherever its creative staff is based. With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Weta Digital will have expanded access to a broad range of specialized GPU instances for better integration of machine learning into the VFX creation process.
“By adopting AWS’s ultra-scale infrastructure, we can implement a proprietary cloud pipeline and globally scale our production to greater levels than ever before,” explains Prem Akkaraju, CEO of Weta Digital. “Weta established a remote collaborative workflow in March due to the pandemic to seamlessly continue work on the Avatar sequels and other films. With the power of AWS, we can now take that success to a global scale. Drawing on AWS’s virtually unlimited compute capacity, we can empower our artists to work safely and securely where they want without technical limitations. In addition, using the breadth and depth of AWS services, we can more easily test new ideas and technologies as we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in visual effects today.”