SAN MATEO, CA — Hammerspace (https://hammerspace.com), which offers the Global Data Environment - a solution that spans across on-prem data centers and public cloud infrastructure - announced that London VFX house Jellyfish Pictures has deployed Hammerspace to advance the company’s virtual studio strategy and fuel ongoing business growth. Deploying Hammerspace has enabled Jellyfish to continue to take on new projects without the worry of finding sufficient local creative talent. In addition, it is saving the company an average of 20 percent on cloud rendering projects by enabling content and leveraging the most cost-effective cloud compute region without concern for where the content was created.
Jellyfish Pictures employs more than 300 artists across two UK studios, and taps remote artists around the globe. The studio’s credits include Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Last Jedi and Rogue One. More recently, the team contributed to the latest addition to the Star Wars franchise with the Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett. Other TV credits include HBO’s Watchmen, Netflix’s The Innocents and Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation.
Jellyfish Pictures’ virtual transformation started in 2017, and the company went all-in with a complete shift to virtual VFX and animation in late 2019. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the studio was inspired to expand its technology capabilities to efficiently leverage a remote talent pool and accelerate the productivity of its new artists around the world.
As projects continued to be added to the Jellyfish workload, expenses also grew for infrastructure and computing resources. A typical rendering job uses thousands of CPUs or GPUs. Jellyfish needed the flexibility to fully utilize all of the compute power they owned and have the option to burst render to the most cost-effective cloud region. Hammerspace can be configured in any new cloud region in minutes. Rendering in London or Los Angeles, for example, is significantly more expensive than in some cloud regions located further from large city centers. Jellyfish Pictures partnered with Azure and Hammerspace to transparently orchestrate content to a distributed and growing workforce, and enable cost-effective renders in a choice of geographic cloud regions.
“Hammerspace provides the flexibility to choose the most cost-effective geographic region for data center and cloud hosting and rendering,” explains Jeremy Smith, chief technology officer at Jellyfish Pictures.
Artists can work from their home office with their preferred set of tools while accessing the content shared across all locations via the Hammerspace Global Data Environment. Hammerspace makes it possible for any user, any application, and any location to share the same data set or content repository and have high-performance, local read/write access to the content. Hammerspace is integrated with Jellyfish Pictures’ workflow management tool, Autodesk ShotGrid, enabling artists to seamlessly access the content they need, where they need it, with the workflow tools of which they are accustomed. The integration of Hammerspace with ShotGrid, coupled with the choice in Microsoft Azure cloud regions, provides Jellyfish automated and efficient data mobility of millions of files for creative work and rendering, massively simplifying decentralized workflows.
Jellyfish also improved its disaster recovery planning using Hammerspace’s replication process to ensure the high availability of assets for ongoing work in the event of an outage.
“Hammerspace’s key mission is to help decentralized organizations use their data where and when they need it,” notes Douglas Fallstrom, senior vice president of product, Hammerspace. “We keep data accessible to the people who need it and their applications – from desktops to servers to the cloud – without requiring the creation of multiple copies of the content. Wherever creative talent is located, they can easily see and access their content no matter where it’s stored.”