Animation studio's computers bring doodles to life

Huhu Studios in Brief

• Founded in 2000 with a handful of animators using DIY computer gear
• Today has 70 staff, about 60 of whom are production crew
• Working on a series of 12 feature films, a Canadian TV series, and two DVDs for the US market
• Collaborates with partners in the United States, Canada, China and Singapore and outsources work to China

"Because we're not a Pixar or a Dreamworks and can't throw millions of dollars at file servers, we've had to be pretty clever and pretty economical"
Bill Boyce, Huhu Studios' animation director and CIO

Not many CIOs can also claim to be movie directors, but Bill Boyce can. Boyce's name has appeared around the world on the big screen as co-director of The Ten Commandments, an animated feature film released in the US last October by Promenade Pictures of Santa Monica, California.

The movie, which screened in New Zealand cinemas in September, was made by Huhu Studios of Snells Beach, north of Auckland, and is the first of a planned dozen Bible epics that Promenade plans to produce. As Ten Commandments director, Boyce shares the credits with actors Sir Ben Kingsley, Christian Slater, Alfred Molina and Elliott Gould, who give voice to the computer-generated cast.

When not directing, Boyce is helping keep Huhu's render farm-consisting since late 2007 of several hundred CPUs in an IBM BladeCenter-running as they convert images created on computer into an animated film.

It's a far cry from the home-built pair of PCs Huhu started out with in 2000, when the studio was set up by entrepreneur Trevor Yaxley. And the successful collaboration with North American partners-aside from Promenade, Huhu is also working with a Canadian distributor-illustrates how today's IT and telecommunications infrastructure give international reach to homegrown animation talent.

"I'm really glad we went with the IBM solution-it's been great," says Boyce. The alternative would have been a continuation of the DIY approach. "It's all the extra things you don't count on like the remote interfacing, the management modules-being able to sit at your desk and do everything." The studio was established to produce Buzz & Poppy, an animated cartoon series based on a pair of huhu beetles dreamed up by Yaxley with the aim of "propagating uplifting and inspiring values" to four- to eight-year-olds.

"At that stage we had a team of eight of us based at the studio," says Boyce, who was hired as animation director and operations manager. But counting writers, story board artists, voice artists and musicians, the production crew swelled to about 100 people. Together, they made 75 seven-minute Buzz & Poppy episodes that ran on TV2 for several years, and sold into over 50 countries.

How things have changed in the years since. Huhu's collaboration with Promenade began in 2005. The making of The Ten Commandments was a multimillion-dollar project and the full dozen Bible movies are expected to be worth US$120 million.

It's a computing-intensive business, with large amounts of grunt required to create and manipulate the digital characters. The cast are first brought to life through the pencil and paper sketches of Huhu's artists. They are then "modelled" and "sculpted"-not in clay, but on a computer-using Maya software, the standard tool for creation of computer-generated imagery (CGI).

For a feature-length movie, the painstaking creation of each frame-with close attention paid to the lighting and texture of every detail-is repeated hundreds of thousands of times. For The Ten Commandments, Boyce says, more than a million frames were produced.

"The final film is about 120,000 frames but there are multiple elements for each frame, so there were well over a million images created."

Producing a film for a cinema-size screen is as demanding as CGI gets. The Ten Commandments was originally intended for high-definition DVD release and, when Promenade decided it wanted to put it on the big screen, the level of detail required in each frame went up a notch. "Every texture has to be to a higher standard," Boyce says

The result was a movie that occupied five computer hard drives when it was transported to Peter Jackson's Park Road post-production facility in Wellington for sound and final polishing.

The enormous-and mission-critical-CGI files Huhu routinely works with place heavy data storage demands on the operation. Boyce says each day terabytes of data-one terabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica-are backed up off-site in case of disaster.

"Staying ahead of the amount of storage space the guys use is the biggie," Boyce says. "Because we're not a Pixar or a Dreamworks and can't throw millions of dollars at file servers, we've had to be pretty clever and pretty economical."

So far disaster hasn't struck, although Huhu's Snells Beach location does present some challenges. Power cuts resulting from wild weather aren't uncommon, a cyclone last year left them twiddling their thumbs for a couple of days before electricity was restored.

Another issue has been poor access to broadband internet services. Weekly transfer of files between Snells Beach and Toronto, for Canadian company CCI Entertainment's animated Turbo Dogs series, should take about 10 hours, but can take days. "That's proved rather stressful," Boyce says.

Relief should be on its way with the doubling of the studio's existing microwave link, and provision of a number of ADSL connections.

Boyce doesn't let himself get too bogged down in the minor details of managing Huhu's infrastructure. He has the assistance of two IT specialists and an IT supplier, so only about 10 percent of his time is spent keeping the studio's computers running.

For the rest he is directing and producing. But what he looks forward to returning to is animation, which he first started doing 20 years ago. "I certainly miss it and probably my retirement plan is being able to do some animation again."

Key Business Insights

Huhu Studios credits Peter Jackson with putting New Zealand on the map when it comes to being a centre for creation of computer-generated imagery. "Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor did us a huge favour with Lord of the Rings-raising the profile of New Zealand-and that absolutely has helped us in the international market in terms of credibility," says Huhu animation director and CIO Bill Boyce.

From using computer hardware it assembled itself to make the Buzz & Poppy series for TV2, it has expanded to having a CGI render farm consisting of several hundred IBM CPUs producing feature films and TV series for North American customers.

But Huhu hasn't just ridden on Jackson's coattails. The Snells Beach-based operation has made a number of strategic moves that have helped its own business, while benefiting other New Zealand animators. Through Lifeway College, which was established by Huhu founder Trevor Yaxley, it offers an NZQA-accredited diploma in advanced animation, from which about 20 students graduate a year.

"We get to grab some of their top students, if we can get them before [Jackson's] Weta," says Boyce.

Huhu is also starting to take a longer-term view of the revenue-earning potential of its work. "For a while a lot of the stuff we were doing was contract work-you'd get paid for it and that was it. But moving forward we're looking to have ownership of the intellectual property, rather than just being a for-hire shop," Boyce says.

The New Zealand animation industry is close and collaborative, says Boyce, and Huhu enjoys good relationships with Weta, and Auckland's Flux Animation, which worked on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth documentary.

"We're a small country in a big world and certainly there's much more a feeling of camaraderie among the studios than competition."

Additional Resources:

Bill Boyce's first stop for digital animation information is CG Talk:

forums.cgsociety.org

Boyce rates Pixar Animation Studios as an important source of inspiration:

www.pixar.com

For tech support, entering an error message code in Google is Boyce's first port of call:

www.google.com