At Dell, we’re excited that award season is once again upon us as it’s a time for us to celebrate our customers that work within the film industry, from powering mind-blowing visual effects to life-like animation to video editing and post-production, high-end powerful Dell technology is behind some of today’s top features.
We’d like to congratulate visual effects company Framestore, who is responsible for recent box office hit Gravity, which took home a Golden Globe on Sunday and received an impressive 11 Academy Award nominations yesterday morning, including best picture and best visual effects! The British studio, which is currently working with Dell to expand its presence into North America with a new office in Montreal, relies on high-performance end-to-end technology from Dell, including Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell Precision workstations, to create and manage extensive day-to-day digital work with minimal downtime.
"As we move forward into increasingly advanced levels of simulation and photorealism having this power on the desktop presents a wealth of creative opportunities for our artists. These machines are both powerful and cost-effective," Framestore CTO Steve MacPherson recently told Computing.
In addition to Gravity, the studio is behind Iron Man 3, the Mclaren F1 animated Tooned series and the title sequence for recent James Bond feature Skyfall, and is now focused on big-budget projects such as RoboCop and Edge of Tomorrow.
This week also marks the premiere of NutJob, the first feature-length stereoscopic film from up-and-coming animation studio ToonBox Entertainment, which opens in theaters today and tells the story of an independent squirrel forced to survive in the big city. In order to meet the exceptionally heavy demands that its unique approach to 3D animation places on both workstations and the servers in its render farm, the company decided to standardize on Dell technology, deploying a solution including Precision workstations PowerEdge C800 servers and Nexenta storage. As a result, ToonBox Entertainment was able to create the high-definition animation required for NutJob within a tight timeframe without sacrificing image quality or expanding resources.
And a discussion of the film and entertainment industry wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Dell’s presence at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah this week. Dell is partnering with the Austin Film Society and Austin Film Commission and other local brands to host the Austin Party, which will celebrate the films created in Dell’s backyard that will be premiering at this year’s festival. At the event, Dell will be showcasing our film editing solutions, including the Dell Precision T7610, Dell Precision M3800 and Dell UltraSharp 32 4K displays running Adobe Premiere Pro, and our latest tablets and 2-in-1’s – the XPS 12, Venue 7, Venue 8, Venue 8 Pro. Additionally, we will be helping to power The Collective by CEG and our tablets and other technologies will be used to power the livestreaming from Sundance in partnership with Bite Size TV, LiveFyre, Twitter and other brands.
From the Golden Globes to today’s Nutjob premiere to Sundance Film Festival, it’s been a big a week for the Dell, and we’re excited for what’s in store in the coming months. Next up Academy Awards then on to SXSW – be sure to check back on the blog to learn more about what we’ve been up to!
