Kathy Gibson reports from Lenovo Accelerate ’25 – Technology is critical to the creation of animated movies like Shrek and Kung Fu Panda – one of the reasons Lenovo has become a key partner with iconic movie studio Dreamworks.
Kate Swanborg, senior vice-president of technology communications and strategic alliances at DreamWorks Animation, points out that – unlike live action movies – everything in an animated film has to be created from scratch.
And these visual effects have to be true to what they are, while conveying a particular mood or ambience.
She relates the creation of a waterfall in an upcoming movie, which has to be realistic and convey the power of water.
Dozens of artists and engineers were involved for seven months to bring the waterfall in “The Wild Robot” to fruition.
Swanborg explains that four different types of algorithms had to be created and layered to get the true effect and power of the waterfall.
A grid solver mapped out where the water should go. A particle solver uses an algorithm that splits particles to make it appear there are billions of droplets. A velocity solver assigns attributes to each particle to make it act like water. And a gas solver allows some particles to appear like mist or steam kicked up as the water pours over the edge.
“We spend that time and effort and thoughtfulness so that the audience can be immersed in the film,” Swanborg says. “And we do it for every aspect of the film making process.”
It takes up to four years, at a cost of about $160-million to craft each film, she adds.
With each movie being running for about 90 minutes, at 24 frames per second, this means 130 000 individual frames are used, with hundreds of control points and assets in each frame.
“Everything on the screen is a digital asset,” Swanborg says. “So we will use 300-million computation rendering hours to craft one movie.”
Impressive as this is, Dreamworks does not create just one movie at a time.
“We have to release two or three films per year, so are typically in simultaneous production on 10 films at any one time.”
At 500-million digital files per film, this equates to about 5-billion active files on the company’s hybrid cloud platform.
“We brand ourselves as storytellers who are in the business of making films – but the secret is that we are actually a digital manufacturer,” Swanborg days. “What we make is data, and tons of it. In fact, it’s the only thing we do make.
“When data is your product, technology is your paintbrush,” Swanborg adds.
Indeed, the technology required to power even a single film is impressive, with each film consisting of 500-million files and 250-billion pixels, using 300-million computational hours and 1 petabyte of data.
Multiply this by 10 for the movies in production at any time, add the television and streaming content, as well as theme park animations also created in the Dreamworks studio, and the computing requirement is impressive.
“So we have to have a thoughtful strategy,” Swanborg says.
There are some business imperatives that the technology needs to support.
The first is the ability to work at the speed of imagination. “We have the best artists and film makers in the world – when they have an idea, it has to be captured immediately.”
The second is that any technology deployed has to be future-proof. “We need to have the confidence that we’ll be able to finish a movie that we started.”
The final imperative is operational agility. “We are a creative enterprise, and we need to be able to pivot when needed.”
These imperatives are why Dreamworks chose to partner with Lenovo, “They understand that we are running a business,” says Swanborg. “We know about innovation and choose partners that have it in their DNA.”
Although artists are all equipped with Lenovo workstations, the two companies actually started their relationship in the data centre.
Swanborg explains that Dreamworks’ data centre requirements have increased enormously since the days of hand-drawn animations. About five years ago, the organisation started running out of space and power.
Relocating the data centre to larger premises was prohibitively expensive, and moving to the cloud was ruled out because of cost and latency issues.
“That’s when Lenovo proposed Neptune servers,” Swanborg says. “The warm water-cooled servers meant we could continue to use our legacy data centre.”
Last year, Dreamworks replaced 210 air-cooled servers with 72 Neptune servers.
The result is that the studio gained 50% more cores than it had previously – but housed in one-third of the number of servers, creating a system that’s 86% more dense, with 100% more memory per core. And the power used was reduced from 300kW to just 80kW.
“So we are using less power and cooling than five years ago, but getting substantially more compute power,” Swanborg says.
Not only this, but the data centre can now contribute to Dreamworks’ sustainability goals while increasing the company’s agility.
Dreamworks is expanding its relationship with Lenovo: it plans to swop out all of its air-cooled servers for Neptune warm water-cooled systems.
And just this week, the company has signed a TruScale agreement with Lenovo which will allow it to provision technology that can be swopped in or out as needed. “This will further enable operational agility,” Swanborg says.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a business enabler that Dreamworks is looking to deploy. “We don’t use AI in the generation of any of our images because we already have amazing artists,” Swanborg emphasises.
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of AI,” she says. “We’ll be looking to AI for operational efficiencies.”