Media and entertainment

IBM helps this digital animation company tackle an industry-wide issue A scene from Threshold’s full-length animated feature, Foodfight!, which includes 138 speaking characters, more than 6,000 “extras” and 174 sets with nearly 5,000 buildings — all digital.

Since digital animation exploded onto the scene more than a decade ago, it has steadily reshaped the film industry. As digital filmmaking capabilities have risen, so has the audience sophistication level, resulting in ever-rising expectations. However, like the movie industry as a whole, digital production companies are also under increasing pressure to both speed production cycles and reduce costs. To succeed in this increasingly demanding environment, Threshold Animation Studios - a digital animation studio that produces its own feature films and television shows, more major 3D theme park attractions than anyone in the world, as well as effects and animation for major corporations and entertainment clients including SONY Pictures, Paramount, Miramax and Disney - adapted key elements of its business strategy.

George Johnsen, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Animation Officer, once thought that neither Threshold nor its competitors would be able to afford the kind of computing power they would need in the not-so-distant future. "We saw that the entire industry was going to be over its head very quickly as far as its horsepower needs," says Johnsen.

Even cursory knowledge of the basic animation process highlights why substantial computing power is so critical. To create a digitally animated character, an artist at a workstation first builds a model or object, and then textures it with light, color and other elements to make it look real. To bring the model alive, the animator then creates an instruction set that tells the objects within that character what to do at a particular point in time. The execution of the instruction set-known as rendering-is where the real heavy lifting starts. In this process, the instruction set is sent back to a high capacity system where the instructions are executed and rendered into frames. The more objects and functions in the frame, the longer it takes to render. Because a frame can take as long as 48 hours to render-and there are thousands of frames in a typical film- there are intensive processing requirements.

In addition to computing resources, Threshold also has to manage the animation artists and achieve a huge design volume in the shortest possible timeframe. The company viewed a distributed workforce strategy, with a global team of designers working collaboratively and seamlessly toward a common goal, as the ideal approach. While entirely consistent with Threshold's virtual studio business model, the use of virtualized animation resources still presented major operational challenges. To make this strategy work, Threshold needed to manage these globally decentralized resources so that they functioned as an efficient, yet flexible unit.

Equally important was the need to track and manage the complex workflow and version control because a scene can be modified several times-by many different designers-after it's created. Losing control of this process can mean costly delays. In short, Threshold needed a way to gain unlimited scalability, while keeping its costs variable and controllable; thus enabling it to avoid the large fixed investments its competitors had made. Further, to realize its vision of a distributed workforce, Threshold needed a way to manage the global collaborative processes, as well as its animation assets, so that artists could more easily respond to changes in the animation workflow. Above all, the solution had to let designers focus on the art. "Technology has to serve art in our business," says Johnsen.

Threshold selected IBM to build an e-studio platform that provides the company with on demand access to a powerful pool of backend resources-all delivered on a pay-as-you-go basis. The solution perfectly complements Threshold's virtual studio model by giving it world-class computing horsepower whenever it needs it. So, as projects inevitably become more complex and rendering-intensive, Threshold can simply add servers to meet the demand and pay only for what it uses. The use of open source technology like Linux further accentuates the solution's cost and flexibility benefits. To facilitate Threshold's distributed workgroup initiative, IBM developed a portal that links the company's global network of designers, while at the same time providing advanced workflow and version control capabilities. If, for example, a designer changes a scene, the system automatically notifies the next person accessing it.

Process improvements resulting from the solution have enabled Threshold to shorten its production cycle to just 18 months-half the time needed for most animated films. The ability to bring films to market more quickly also translates into lower capital costs. Being an on demand business has also produced big savings by eliminating the need to invest millions in infrastructure that would be used only a fraction of the time, and would greatly increase the company's exposure to obsolescence risk. Ultimately, Threshold expects to cut its overall IT spending by 25 percent. On the process side, the company expects workflow and asset management improvements to cut its overall labor costs by 12 to 15 percent.

For now, the company plans to build on its success with IBM through follow-on initiatives that will further improve the collaboration of its virtual design team. The company is also working with IBM to make its systems even more intelligent and autonomic, and thus better able to handle the steady growth in animation complexity without missing a beat-or a frame.

Threshold's major animated feature film Foodfight! featuring cutting-edge animation techniques and technologies and the voices of Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria, Hillary Duff, Hailey Duff, Wayne Brady, Christopher Lloyd, Chris Kattan and others will be released by Lions Gate Family Entertainment in Fall, 2006. Threshold CEO Larry Kasanoff is the director.