Bristol-based award-winning cloud and crowd-sourced render services company YellowDog has been busy this Christmas. Using its virtual super computer powers, the startup has collaborated with BAFTA-winning animation studio Blue Zoo to help with the last-minute rendering of its animation, a hilarious spoof movie ad, called ‘No More Stuff’.
“Our own render farm is maxed out for other needs so using YellowDog’s cloud rendering has been the answer”
Despite being just 1 minute and 4 seconds in length, the animation (below) contains a whopping 20 movie references. The challenge. Guess them all!
Festive collaboration
Blue Zoo is already known for its yearly festive-themed animations. In fact, last year’s ‘More Stuff‘ was award winning.
Yet, the process of rendering detailed animations, even as short as these, poses an incredible challenge and, this year, YellowDog has been able to step in and help.
“This particular project has taken only a couple of weeks to render”
YellowDog is building the world’s fastest supercomputer by harnessing and monetising underutilised computer power, enabling an incredibly quick and cost effective delivery, through leveraging this virtually unlimited power on demand.
Tom Box, Co-Founder and Director at Blue Zoo, explains: “The most challenging knock-on effect from a tight schedule is render time, or lack of it! And producing high-quality tactile renders full of hair doesn’t help matters, as they are notoriously slow to render. Our own render farm is maxed out for other needs so using YellowDog’s cloud rendering has been the answer.
“It has seamlessly integrated with our own in-house provision so our artists don’t know if their shot was being rendered locally in our server room or on YellowDog’s servers in a data centre thousands of miles away.”
Gareth Williams (pictured above left), Founder and Managing Director at YellowDog, adds: “Having loved Blue Zoo’s 2015 Christmas animation, we have been eagerly anticipating what they would produce in 2016. The studio is known for their high-quality animation and therefore they need render services to fit. This particular project has taken only a couple of weeks to render, all done in the knowledge that it will be ready for the launch. By which time we hope to have named all the movies referred to in the film short!”
Find out more about Yellowdog and its virtual supercomputer by checking out the Yellowdog website or following them on Twitter: @yellodogltd.
