Avatar finds The Way of Cloud

Cloud computing is revolutionising both the business and the art of movie-making. Major advances in technology have made possible production techniques that were not possible just three years ago. It also means that outposts of the industry, like South Africa, will become part of a move towards the globalisation of film production, as international collaboration becomes possible on a scale never possible before.

“The journey has just started,” said Nina Walsh, Australia and New Zealand business development leader for media and entertainment at Amazon Web Services (AWS), during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week.

She was speaking in a panel discussion on the future of entertainment, which included Jon Landau, legendary movie producer of both Titanic and Avatar, the number one and three highest grossing motion pictures of all time.

This month, the box office globally holds its collective breath for the December 16 release of the sequel to the latter, Avatar: The Way of Water, also produced by Landau. The industry is expected to go over the movie footage with a fine-tooth comb to learn how its groundbreaking 3D animation was made possible.

Landau told the panel: “There were shots that were so complex, I’m talking about a 4-second shot, not an hour-long shot, that would take two weeks to render. And we’d be waiting there for it. And there were times where we’d take even longer to get something back. So we needed to create an efficiency that allowed us to get through 3,300 shots in this movie. The task was daunting. And the difference when we went to the cloud was truly powerful and we would have not been able to do it without the support of AWS.”

Landau said that most of the animated scenes in the original Avatar movie had only two characters in a single frame. Director James Cameron decided to up the ante dramatically in the sequel.

“Now, we have five, ten, twelve characters, with hundreds of backgrounds and extras that need to be generated and rendered.  All of those need to be rendered, one after the other. We outgrew the capacity to do that on the ground. Not just the capacity, we outgrew the power grid.”

Rendering refers to the processing of all the elements of a frame in an animated image. This is the most time-consuming element of animated movies, and one of the reasons the original Avatar took 15 years to make: the technology wasn’t up to the demands of the director. At one stage Cameron shelved the project while he waited for computer generated graphics to catch up.

The sequel took almost as long due to stop-motion-capture technology not being advanced enough to use underwater. The combination of rendering in the cloud and advances in graphics and capture mean it will be possible for the next three sequels will appear two years apart.

“We had to learn about the cloud,” said Landau. “When we first started we were a little skeptical. In the nascent stages of the cloud, we were protecting our IP (intellectual property) at all costs. There are a lot of security questions: Where is it going to go? Who can access it? We had a whole movie in the cloud and the team really had to convince us that everything at AWS was set up and how secure it was.

“That was the path to opening the floodgates to allow us to get out the amount of work we needed to make all of these scenes. The throughput transformed what we were able to do.”

Walsh said that AWS had to pull in specialists from across the globe, working closely with New Zealand visual effects company Weta FX on the ground.

Weta executive visual effects producer David Conley told the panel that the idea of having different facilities working together raised the possibility of making movies on a global scale with teams across the globe.

“I’d like to see what filmmakers can do in parts of the world that we’ve never seen before,” he said. “How do we bring all of that data into an architecture in a combined way, into a place where we can work on it from multi-site zones, and make a movie that can tap into the artists and people that help us make their movies?

“We have to connect filmmakers who work on sets in locations that we’ve never seen before.  But what we should never lose sight of is people. It’s the artists, it’s the partnerships. Technology is just a tool that gets us there.

“How we work together using those tools gives us the confidence to deliver on making a movie. But that confidence comes from partnering with people around the world in areas that we wouldn’t have been able to access: not only London and Vancouver, but Africa, Mongolia, Turkey. We can bring those people together through the cloud. Those are the next steps. We’re paving the future as opposed to reacting.”

According to Landau, the more people use the cloud in this way, the more cost-effective it would become.

“We’re trying to make the technology as ubiquitous as possible. The more people are trained on it, the more we can work in the cloud, securely. It gives us lot of flexibility. It allows us to expand what we are doing. We don’t want to do one movie every couple of years. With connected resources in the sky, we can tell stories that would not have been possible before.”

Walsh told Business Times later, in an exclusive interview, that South Africa with its bustling film industry would become an increasingly attractive setting for global productions.

_{Nina Walsh, Australia and New Zealand business development leader for media and entertainment at Amazon Web Services (AWS)}

“Looking at different environments to shoot in and accessing different talent, having some of those amazing landscapes in South Africa, for example, similarly to Australia, where you have green lush environments and dry, desert type scenes, is very attractive to film companies.

“South Africa is a growing market. We’re working with a number of studios there, to look at how we can help support them from a compute perspective. The same can be said for Malaysia and Thailand.

“Previously everything’s had to be in one room from a security perspective, from a workflow perspective, and because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Now you should be able to work from South Africa for a production that’s happening in Australia, or happening in Spain. We take care of the technology so that they can focus on making the films.”

Walsh, who spent 15 years in visual effects, animation and post-production in movie-making, said that the flexible cloud services provided by AWS were ideal for the film industry.

“The nature of the workflow is spiky, in that when you start in pre-production, you don’t need a lot of data or compute initially. And then it ramps up to the point where you’re rendering shots to send to directors, and all of a sudden you need to  quadruple your footprint. But instead of purchasing millions of dollars worth of hardware, you can use us, we give that capacity that you need. And when you deliver the film, you turn it off.”