Brown Bag Films realise their global virtual studio
with pixstor & ngenea

London, UK, 25th April 2022 – Leading storage and data management solutions provider, pixitmedia and award-winning animation studio, Brown Bag Films celebrate the success of realising a globally integrated, fully-shared production environment across its creative hubs in Dublin, Toronto, Bali and New York. Brown Bag Films have always pushed the potential of what is possible, which is how they have established themselves as one of the world’s leading animation houses. At any one time, Brown Bag Films can be working on up to as many as 23 different episodic series at once.

SVP of Technology, John Brady, and his team had a vision; to make their existing workflow pipeline definitively ‘fit for the future.’ A bold, brave enterprise that would push the tech teams and collaborative partners into uncharted territory.

“Getting our best and brightest focused solely on making the automated virtual studio a reality was a risk, but one that’s more than paid off. It’s the reason the new pipeline is now fully operational.”

John Brady, SVP Technology at Brown Bag Films

With such large production pipelines to futureproof, Brown Bag Films needed to escape their existing infrastructure silos and time-zone frustrations to collaborate efficiently and intelligently.

The scenario of multiple global teams working on the same files simultaneously was the reality, with data stored and shared in different ways. This resulted in long hours manually downloading and sharing files, leaving the team frustrated and causing project timelines to be extended.

Leveraging the existing knowledge and industry experience of pixitmedia, Brown Bag Films was able to drive towards a unified data storage solution that would allow its global creative teams to rapidly share assets and work more efficiently together, like never before.

pixstor and ngenea, the software-defined storage and dynamic data management solutions from pixitmedia, allow users to search, access and work directly on files in desktop applications, no matter where those files are stored in the organisation.

With a unified, simultaneous view of data at all global sites, files are available to be worked on seamlessly. No specialist or user training required. Just simple and accessible.

“Our users are now happily oblivious to what’s happening on the filesystem. To the artist, the files are just there. Wherever the files are presented, it feels like they’re interacting with the room next door rather than across the globe. The user experience is seamless. From artists in Dublin, writers in New York to lighters in Bali, all members of the Production team in each location now have access to all Production files, all at the same time.”

Darren Hyland, Director of Technology at Brown Bag Films

Brown Bag Films’ artists and creatives can now give themselves over to their creative instincts, delivering their best work, instead of fighting against traditional file sharing infrastructure.

Darren Hyland explains the impact of the virtual studio pipeline for Brown Bag Films’ creative productions:

“Moving to a centralised global filesystem has dramatically changed our Pipeline and workflow. Our typical long-form productions are worked on collaboratively across multiple locations; creators in New York, directors and creative team based in Dublin, with a large percentage of animation and lighting completed in Bali.
With the Global Asset Management pipeline, all production files are presented to each location in a near real-time experience, so we are guaranteed that each department has the latest files and versions of the production data.  All the file-sharing is via pixitmedia, the media, the assets, everything!”

John Brady, SVP Technology at Brown Bag Films:

“This was a different pipeline last year, where files had to be zipped and shipped in a much more push/pull workflow. It’s a huge achievement, not only from a technical standpoint, but it also demonstrates the new industry benchmark; truly global, truly collaborative, truly automated.”

Barry Evans, Co-Founder & CTO of pixitmedia, summarises the importance of Brown Bag Films’ virtual studio pipeline being operational and the role it plays in discovering innovative solutions that go beyond the industry standard:

“We have been with Brown Bag every step of this journey; it is industry leaders like Brown Bag that challenge us to find solutions with our products that move the needle for that day-to-day business. What Brown Bag has achieved is the holy grail of centralised asset management and data orchestration and we are immensely proud to have been a part of this vision. We are looking forward to the next innovations we can develop together that benefit the industry as a whole.”