1. Legend Of The Guardians The Owls Of Ga’hoole By Alex Timbs
2. With a 3-year production cycle for a major animated feature ahead of them, the artists at Australia's Animal Logic had a lot of work to do -- before they could begin working.
4. "Happy Feet" was Australia's first digital animated feature, and won the 2006 Academy Award(R) for Best Animated Feature. At the helm of production and visual effects? Melbourne's Animal Logic. Founded in 1991, they have been part of some of the most groundbreaking, visually rich pictures and television of our time, including "The Matrix," "Babe," "Fars cape," "Moulin Rouge!" "The Thin Red Line," "House of Flying Daggers," and many more.
5. Just a few months after "Happy Feet" was released came another film that Animal Logic worked on, the stunning "300," directed by Zack Snyder, whose work also includes "Watchmen." On one level, it might have seemed odd for someone whose last couple of features were rated R for graphic violence, sex and language to take on a movie based on a popular series of children's books, "The Guardians of Ga'hoole." On closer examination, it was a remarkable fit: stories of an alliance to protect a kingdom, a group of "Pure Ones" whose leader wears a mask to conceal his battle scars, kidnapping, slavery, and the rise to honor in the midst of exceptionally bloody battles.
6. As things get green lit, we begin working with productions to come up with very rough render and storage estimates, to at least get a stake in the ground. We then review what sort of infrastructure we have available at the time, a) whether you've got the capacity, b) whether you've got the processing power, and based on whatever you already have available, what you're going to need to add. Even whether you've got the right models or brands of products to address that specific production.
7. It turns out that there is significant infrastructure churn to keep running at the capacity and performance required to get the images out the door. Over the course of a three-year production, you're refreshing your entire render farm, or a large portion of it, and potentially replacing your entire storage after each project as you ramp up for the next one. Each project almost carries its own storage and render budget. The goal was to optimize data so that we weren't sending huge uncompressed data where it was not needed.
