The studio collaborated with DIGIC Pictures, Axis Animation, Illusorium, Platige, and Goodbye Kansas on the animated anthology series, scaling render capacity while sharing files with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to alleviate rendering challenges.
From the creative minds behind , Prime Video’s new adult-animated anthology series, , features original stories set within the worlds of beloved video games.Produced by Blur Studio in collaboration with Amazon MGM Studios for Prime Video, the series combines in-house and partnered creations.
Blur developed the and episodes internally, while collaborating with DIGIC Pictures, Axis Animation, Illusorium, Platige, and Goodbye Kansas to produce the others.To scale render capacity for its own work, Blur leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS), which also supported the render demands of vendors DIGIC Pictures and Goodbye Kansas.“AWS solves a number of production challenges for us, the chief one being rendering,” noted Sean Cody, Blur Head of Systems.
“AWS is a force multiplier of our existing capabilities and gives us the flexibility to do things we couldn’t before, like quickly transferring data globally.” “AWS gave us powerful resources to tackle unexpected hurdles,” added longtime Blur Studio Executive Producer Greg Talmage.“We’re increasingly seeing a fusion of linear and interactive storytelling, and the notion of intellectual property (IP) as entertainment is gaining traction based on past successes.Having the right technology to support the exploration of these new creative avenues is essential.” In addition to Blur’s “Warhammer 40,000” and “Unreal Tournament” episodes, the series features shorts set in the universes of various PlayStation entitiesand The studios worked primarily independently, but shared files with Blur via Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
“At one point, we needed data from a vendor really quickly, so we set up an S3 bucket, which made it super easy for them to drop in what was needed,” Cody shared.“If I had to build hardware to support that, it would have taken weeks.With AWS, I can problem solve immediately.” One driver for the studio’s adoption of AWS was increasing rendering needs.
“We use AWS as an expansion of our render capacity, which I would call ‘elastic capacity,’” noted Cody.“When we hit some kind of a roadblock where we need more compute, we can offload a lot of that work onto the cloud.” Blur rendered part of its 15-minute “Warhammer 40,000” episode with AWS, specifically Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances.“The amount of work we’ve taken on to get this series out the door is staggering, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without AWS,” said Cody.
“In the past, we’d get rentals when we exceeded our farm capacity, but the cloud is a game changer.” The studio created the “Unreal Tournament” episode in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, so scalable render resources weren’t needed.However, as Blur increasingly takes on other real-time projects, Cody envisions virtual workstations on AWS will become key.He explained, “We work with artists all over the planet and we can’t expect freelancers to have the beefy hardware needed to run Unreal, nor are we going to ship workstations around the world.
We have more data set control in Unreal than with traditional creative applications, so we can better manage data transfer and sync, making this a great use case for virtual workstations, which we hope to start exploring next year.”
Emphasizing Blur’s upcoming ambitions, Talmage concluded, “We’re focused on moving from short form to longer form projects and AWS will be a big part in helping us overcome technical challenges to achieve that.”
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Journalist, antique shop owner, aspiring gemologist—L'Wren brings a diverse perspective to animation, where every frame reflects her varied passions.
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