Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/348146
www.postmagazine.com 26 POST JULY 2014 USING THE CLOUD Technology Center. "If you see the cloud as the logical progression of digital and fi le-based workfl ows, it makes a lot of sense," Katrib emphasizes. "Other industries have really capitalized on distributed or cloud technol- ogies — fi nance, healthcare, government. We're clearly late to the game, but I'm very excited about how our creative industry will use the cloud in the years to come." BRIGADE According to Brigade founder David Dimeola, "the cloud is the core feature that allows our business model to thrive." From its New York City hub, Brigade (www.brigade.tv) curates top creative teams around the world for design, ani- mation and VFX using proprietary cloud- based systems to manage people and projects. "Since our company is always based on remote talent and team assem- bly, the cloud becomes the most natural extension of that process," he says. "It makes it eff ortless to work this way." A very early proponent of the cloud, Brigade has been developing its own tools for the last half-dozen years. Its Flock software enables the company to dynamically track its global talent roster while VES software establishes VFX pipelines for jobs and manages assets for the remotely-based talent. "The key advantages are we get to work with the best person for the job no matter where they are, and it's very scalable — unlike having to buy more workstations, if you fi ll them up we can just add another team member to the cloud and we're ready to go," says Dimeola. "There's also a cost savings since we have limited over- head and no traditional infrastructure." While Brigade has had much success with its distributed creative workfl ow, Dimeola says the hardest part has been "getting clients to be happy and com- fortable with the model. It has defi nitely taken some education at agencies and production companies and direct to business to show them how remote collaboration can work well and deliver a great product." The remote team model has also required Brigade to acquire "a new set of management skills," he notes. "There's a new set of operating rules and culture, new ways to keep people excited and in- terested, which can be hard to do when people are in the same room let alone around the world. But most creatives love the work-lifestyle balance." A recent PSA, Physics Professor, for the New Mexico Department of Transportation from VWK/Albuquer- que, brought together Brigade creative director Sean Broughton at the New York City headquarters, lead compositor Mark Rubbo working remotely in New York, and lead particle artist Zack Detox in Vancouver. The :30 spot features beau- tiful amorphous shapes fl ying through a black void. They resolve into equations drawn on a chalkboard as a voice de- scribes the complex math of momentum and velocity. The camera fi nally reveals a classroom and professor who reduces the science to a very basic maxim: "It's quite simple really, avoid death or injury by always wearing your seatbelt." "There was a lot of remote conversa- tion among director Tobias Mehler [of The Rogue Unit, NY], producer Brent Morris, the agency and us about the concept — how it should look and move," Dimeola recalls. "Once we felt good about what they were looking for we did exploratory design frames; we followed the same kind of traditional process that any boutique design shop would use but we managed it remotely using software that allowed us to see each other's desktops." Brigade's remote talent model enabled the company to select "an incredibly-ac- complished particle artist who has a rich history of feature fi lm work" to create the equation VFX in Vancouver. "Zack was between projects and had two weeks to give us," Dimeola says. "The client got a highly-specialized artist, someone they wouldn't normally get if they used whoev- er a studio had in-house." Brigade's secure FTP server with project fi le server allowed Rubbo in New York to see Detox's renders in realtime and pull them into Adobe After Eff ects for compositing. Broughton could also grab renders for Autodesk Flame com- positing that required time warps and transitions from the particle world to the live-action world. Although Detox had enough render power on his own, other jobs have made use of cloud-based render farms, such as Amazon's EC2, Render Core and Render Titan, says Dimeola. He believes the cloud will be "a major game changer" for the industry and its eff orts to "keep projects profi table." He continues, "It's still in the early stages, but there have been forecasts of Internet speeds from NASA and Google up to a terabyte per second. If even half of that speed becomes possible, a remote team of artists from multiple locations could poten- tially transfer all the shots from a feature fi lm in a very short amount of time." HULA POST Josh Rizzo, CTO of Hula Post (www.hul- apost.com), which has offi ces in Burbank and West Los Angeles, says we're living in an era in which "production and post have been IT-icized." As a guy with an IT background himself, he's been happy with the turn of events. "Once you're using IT principles, the world gets a lot bigger and has a lot more possibilities," he reports. Take Hula Post's cloud-based realtime review and approvals system, The Work- ABC's Mistresses has 100TBs of cloud storage from DFT. JSP used the cloud to create Boots No7 Web spots. Hula's services have also been used on Blue Bloods. Brigade brought together talent in New York and Vancouver for this PSA. The Good Wife uses Hula's cloud-based services.