After it was revealed that Microsoft helped James Cameron with his epic 3D movie Avatar this past February you probably had a feeling that there were other technology companies out there in similar situations.
Well IBM is that next company to join Microsoft in the realm of 3D film technology production and support.
In a recent press release IBM announced it worked with Illumination Entertainment to meet production requirements to create the 3D film Despicable Me which is in full release from Universal Studios today.
With today’s increased emphasis on animation and visual effects, the digital rendering process has become a competitive differentiator and critical production capability for studios of all sizes. The process involves literally hundreds of thousands of individual images that are created by hand and rendered through digital animation to effectively build each individual frame of the film, all of which requires intensive computing power. For "Despicable Me" the animation process generated 142 terabytes of data — an amount roughly equivalent to the traffic generated by over 118 million active MySpace users or 250,000 streams of 25 million songs.
"’Despicable Me’ represents a breakthrough in the emerging model of collaborative, geographically distributed digital movie making, which we are proud to be building from the ground up. By seamlessly bringing together creative talent from the U.S., France and other locations around the world via technology, we completed a massive production undertaking that is often left to larger single-location Hollywood studios," said Chris Meledandri, Producer of "Despicable Me" and founder of Illumination Entertainment. "Thanks to the capacity of IBM’s rendering technology and the skills of our artists, we were able to bring our creative vision to life through the completion of a wonderfully entertaining film and build the foundation for a large pipeline of projects in development."
