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Animation needs make studios hot customers

By Dean Takahashi
Knight Ridder Newspapers

JOANNE HOYOUNG LEE / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Andy Hendrickson, head of technology for PDI Dreamworks, says on-demand computing made "Shrek II" better. "If we had to buy 1,000 computers for just three months, it wouldn't have been fiscally responsible. We would have had to take a lot of short cuts."

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When Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina strolled the red carpet with DreamWorks SKG founder Jeffrey Katzenberg at the Academy Awards this year, her turn in the limelight was more about gigabytes than glamour.

Hollywood studios such as DreamWorks have become coveted customers for HP and its rivals as the shift to digital animation demands sophisticated computing know-how. Fiorina wants to make sure that HP — and not competitors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems — is the heir to one-time digital-effects powerhouse Silicon Graphics.

Thanks in part to a collaboration with HP, the animation division of DreamWorks SKG is having a good year. It has launched two major movies in one year. "Shrek 2" has grossed a gargantuan $436 million in North America, and "Shark Tale" generated $118 million in just three weeks.

Those hits helped power DreamWorks Animation's recent initial public stock offering. The company raised $660 million, giving it an initial valuation of about $3 billion.

	Puss n' Boots in Shrek2

One engine behind this bonanza is DreamWorks' use of a novel technology concept in which the company rents computing power from HP. The two companies worked together on the original "Shrek" movie in 2001 and they expanded their partnership in the making of "Shrek 2."

HP hopes such deals will help it make a stand against its larger rival IBM, which doesn't have a consumer business of its own and is in many ways an underdog when it comes to Hollywood connections.

HP wants to be the king of entertainment technology, with both its digital consumer products such as portable music players, as well as Hollywood computing services.

When crunch time came with the production of "Shrek 2," DreamWorks' PDI/DreamWorks division in Redwood City, Calif., tapped all 1,000 computers on its campus.

But that wasn't enough. So it plugged into HP's "utility rendering service," effectively borrowing another 500 powerful computer servers at HP. In rendering, a computer takes software instructions from a programmer and creates an image out of millions of digital dots known as pixels.

All told, DreamWorks used 10 million computer hours to complete the movie — more than three times the computing power it used in the first "Shrek." That's why every blade of grass in the movie looks realistic.

When DreamWorks was done with the computers, HP made them available to other customers to rent computing time.

"Those processors came in handy at the end of the production," said Ken Bielenberg, visual-effects supervisor on "Shrek 2." "The utility rendering service lets us more dynamically increase and decrease the technology on each show."

Cost savings

HP's service helps DreamWorks keep production costs in check. "If we had to buy 1,000 computers for just three months, it wouldn't have been fiscally responsible. We would have had to take a lot of short cuts," said Andy Hendrickson, head of animation technology at PDI/DreamWorks.

In "Shark Tale," DreamWorks used 1,000 HP servers and 300 of its own to render the movie, which included a complex scene where more than 16,000 computer-animated fish swam together.

The companies also established a joint-marketing partnership for DreamWorks' forthcoming "Madagascar."

Gene Becker, director of utility services at HP Labs, said the rendering services don't help DreamWorks "do better stories, but it helps them stay on schedule, and that's important with a $100 million budget."

"The overall cost of the computing power is low, but the influence it has on costs is big," he added.

Anthony Hodgson, a directing animator on "Shrek 2," barely noticed HP's off-site computers were used to render images. He would simply dispatch a processing job to be done and wait for it to come back.

While he waited for a shot to be processed, he would turn to another screen and work on another scene. HP's servers are five times faster than the older Silicon Graphics machines he used when he contributed to the film "Antz."

In "Shrek," much of the film's production was dedicated to rendering human faces that had to look like the real thing. The characters' hair had to move just right, and light had to bounce off objects and produce shadows in precisely the right way. If they didn't, the animations would destroy the illusion and distract the viewer.

Bielenberg said that because the artists had the utility rendering service at their disposal, they didn't have to plunder computing power from "Madagascar." Now DreamWorks plans to use its own in-house computers at the beginning of every film and then finish production with HP's utility rendering service.

Fiorina has said that the DreamWorks deal and a similar one with Disney are proof that HP has an edge over archrival IBM in the entertainment technology business.

IBM's efforts

IBM has hardly conceded the fight. Steve Canepa, vice president of global media and entertainment at IBM, says Big Blue has provided services and Linux-based computers to more than 75 special-effects companies in the past several years.

As studios look to cut costs, they have replaced their older, more expensive SGI supercomputers — the ones used to make special-effects spectaculars such as "Jurassic Park" and "The Matrix" — with cheaper servers.

While IBM lacks marquee customers such as DreamWorks, it has had success with its own version of utility computing, which it calls "on demand" computing.

The computers at Threshold Digital Entertainment Research Labs of Santa Monica, Calif., contain 1,000 microprocessors. But that's not enough when the company is finishing up cartoon shorts or animated films such as the "Star Trek: Borg Invasion." So it taps into IBM's data center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

"I make funny pictures for a living," said George Johnsen, Threshold Digital's chief technology officer. "If I can get more computing power, then that's one more thing I don't have to leave out of my movie because it's too expensive or takes too much processing power to do. If it's IBM's responsibility, I don't worry about them."

"Time is our enemy," Johnsen added. "Having that resource there gives us flexibility."

PDI/DreamWorks President Patti Burke agrees. "As crunch time approaches, you have to get the pixels out the door."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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