Big Screen Productions and a Future Set on Storytelling Forever

Having worked on almost every aspect of animation for major brands and agencies around the world, the team at Sunrise Productions decided they want to focus on a large scale feature film and so, they went into production on Jungle Beat: The Movie, a feature length film based on their short stories. The project was a collaboration with Sandcastle studios in Mauritius. Discovering the ideal solution to a remote workflow during a global Pandemic was a priority. They needed to reduce costs, improve workflow and experience no down time on hardware.

Evolving from short stories, and brand marketing to a big scope, large scale feature film was more intricate than anything the company had done to date. The Studio had 50 people around the world, and around 130 in South Africa working on this project. This was a large-scale effort that pushed the boundaries of what the studio thought was possible.

The Jungle Beat franchise are all designed and rendered in Autodesk Maya. “It's one piece of software that sits at the core of everything we do,“ says Luke Marchant, Head of Technology at Sunrise Productions. As the company evolved and required more complex software and hardware infrastructure, it incorporated Autodesk ShotGrid into its production management workflow. “We use Shotgun to run our entire pipeline, from production to schedules and all our departmental tasks,” says Marchant. This, he says allows them to not only improve the overall production workflow, but it allowed them to do some impressive things, like automating steps inside Maya to cut on time wasted doing repetitive design and rendering. Sunrise switched to the Arnold render engine, which has delivered impressive turnaround times compared to their old render engine.

Fortunately, most of its team can remotely connect to their office workstations and take advantage of their hardware without too much effort. When the workstations are not in use, they are incorporated into the distributed render farm that forms part of this impressive 60 node server farm which renders the frames that are waiting in the queue. “Now that it’s been proven that remote collaboration is possible, we need to work on a global distribution model, and develop a strategy on how to scale that,” says Marchant. He wants teams who work remotely on the shows to have the same low latency experience in a live production environment. The ongoing challenge is optimizing the software licensing model for the company, but he says they are working closely with Modena Design Centres and Autodesk to figure out the most efficient licensing model for their ever-evolving needs.

The Studio said "yes to more" by adopting the comprehensive Autodesk Media & Entertainment Industry Collection and have definitely seen the benefits of the reduced costs and improved workflow with the Collection. Using Autodesk software has also enabled the company to maintain operations during the global pandemic as the company was already geared-up to work with teams around the world. “In fact, the last 10% to 15% of the render of our latest feature film was done while our teams were working from home,” says Marchant. For the South African artists working on that project, Sunrise Productions uses Maya to enable their artists to keep working, with the 8th season of the Jungle Beat TV series being compiled entirely by their teams all working from home. While internet connectivity and load-shedding remain an issue with teams working remotely, Marchant’s team has been able to come up with a number of customised solutions for teams who do not have access to the tools they need.