“Let's Eat” the animated short film by Anamon Studios made in the cloud

“Let's Eat” the animated short film by Anamon Studios made in the cloud

More than 150 artists create a 6,5-minute story with remote cloud collaboration

Let's Eat story

Focused on the relationship of a Chinese immigrant, Lina, and her American daughter, Luan, the animated short Let's eat, it invites us to reflect on the themes of personal family identity, on generational dynamics and on how food can fill cultural gaps, from a distinctly Asian-American perspective. Although initially close, Lina and Luan separate, before finding themselves facing each other at lunchtime.

The foundation of Anamon Studios

A passion project that has lasted for more than three years, Let's eat it was conceived and completed by director Dixon Wong and producer Amy Kuo. To make the short film, the duo co-founded Anamon Studios, a virtual operation that includes recent art school graduates and volunteer students, who come together to create and share diverse and inclusive stories through animation.

Cloud production on AWS

With Let's eat being Anamon Studios' first venture, Wong and Kuo set out to develop a workflow, which would allow them to produce content efficiently and, at the same time, enable collaboration between artists and animators from around the world. The use of cloud-based solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS) has proved crucial for Anamon Studios to produce content with greater flexibility and cost efficiency.

The rendering work

For the most part, each artist worked on their local workstation, using Autodesk Maya, Substance Painter, ZBrush o Foundry's Nuke depending on the activity. The files were centralized on a Dropbox account, shared synchronized with Amazon Simple Storage (S3). Once the files were ready to render, dedicated render wranglers using Windows-based virtual workstations submitted the jobs to Pixar's RenderMan, running on a fleet of Linux-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Spot Instances . This allowed the team to leverage idle capacity and minimize computing resource costs. Eventually, more than 30.000 hours of draft and final frames for the film were rendered on AWS.

Let's eat

In addition to the render wranglers, Wong also used virtual workstations on AWS for the project; stated: “We are a micro studio working with limited resources, so it was ideal for us to use AWS and not have to buy a lot of hardware. Our setup allowed renderers to focus solely on submitting renders, freeing up artists' time to produce creativity. The cloud is the future and what Amy and I built looks more like the studio of tomorrow. "

“Renting a space and hosting a group of people was not an option for us,” Kuo added. “We needed an affordable and scalable solution. We founded Anamon Studios to create authentic stories and inspire talent, and AWS helped translate our vision into reality. Without the cloud, we wouldn't have been able to connect with artists around the world in such a smooth animation pipeline. "

Video interview with the authors

Let's eat

At the peak of production, 60 production artists simultaneously worked on Let's eat and 150 artists from the US, Colombia, Russia, the UK, Indonesia, and many other countries leveraged shared project data in Dropbox and Amazon S3.

Let's eat

Let's eat

Let's eat it will be screened on demand at the San Diego International Film Festival, which will be held practically October 15-18. The film is slated for online release after the completion of its festival run. For updates, follow the project via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

For more information on building on AWS, visit www.awsthinkbox.com/studio-in-the-cloud.

Let's eat

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