pixitmedia powers Cloud workflow at Chicken Bone FX Studios
- July 25, 2022
London, United Kingdom July 25th, 2022: Chicken Bone FX Studios has teamed up with pixitmedia and Konsistent Consulting to design a bespoke, high-performance and intelligent data-managed solution running in the Cloud. Based on pixstor secured workstations connected by ngenea to AWS, the new agile and scalable collaborative workflow serves high-end film and TV clients, with the artistry of the best visual effects talent located anywhere in the world.
Chicken Bone FX Studios is one of the finest boutique VFX facilities in the business, employing up to 80 artists known for masterful visuals, high-end environments, photoreal FX, compositing technical prowess and innovative global workflow. The company works on some of the industry’s highest-profile series such as Westworld, The Queen’s Gambit, The Walking Dead and Foundation for a variety of studios and Networks including Netflix, Apple, Warner Bros, HBO, AMC, Amazon Studios, NBC, ABC, CBS, Hulu and others.
With its existing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) no longer able to sustain the performance or elasticity required to maintain growth, Chicken Bone FX Studios reached out to pixitmedia to unleash new capacity and easily unlock talent pools located anywhere.
Working closely with the facility, pixitmedia devised, tested and implemented a fully cloud-based setup for Chicken Bone FX Studios 2D pipeline. This featured a pixstor ‘hot’ tier on the front end for live projects linked to AWS S3 for limitless archive capacity. ngenea’s high-performance data management layer automatically extends and scales the local file system to give Chicken Bone FX Studios granular control of their data.
John Renzulli, Founder/VFX Supervisor, Chicken Bone FX Studios says,
The cost-benefit analysis of workflow improvement through leaning more heavily on public cloud solutions and utilizing intelligent data management was immediate and clear to us. Moving into an environment where we had the ability and the control and scale of our virtual desktops, plus storage in an almost real-time manner was incredibly attractive. pixitmedia was the only partner able to provide the holistic solution required for this endeavour.”
Barry Evans, CTO pixitmedia, said
“It is an absolute pleasure working with a studio such as Chicken Bone FX, they are such a forward-thinking business. They understand the importance of not having to change their existing workflow to make use of technology, but having a storage and data management solution that adapts to their workflow.’’
Chicken Bone FX Studios creative teams benefitted from an instant leap in performance, as the sluggish access and sharing of project bins was consigned to history. With ngenea constantly monitoring and managing the transfer of data between pixstor to the most cost-efficient tiers, Chicken Bone FX Studios is able to dramatically reduce its overall storage cost.
Chicken Bone FX Studios now plans to onboard its 3D setup to the pixitmedia Cloud storage architecture, and can advance its ambition to establish a high-performance link between its East and West Coast facilities with creative hubs worldwide for a truly seamless, collaborative and global working environment.
Renzulli says,
“With pixitmedia, we are able to super serve this mission with global growth and scalability. Entering different markets is now a reality, since pixitmedia takes the pain out of the process and allows our incredible creative teams to focus purely on their art.”