FRIDAY ANI-MA-TION

Film animation technology has come a long way since the early days of hand-drawn cartoons. The techniques used by animators to bring characters to life have improved dramatically over the years, and unlike traditional animation, which made its debut in 1906 and created the illusion of movement through frame-by-frame manipulation of drawings and illustrations, most animators today use computers to generate three-dimensional images.

Pixar, together with Disney, was the first company to create a feature-length computer-generated animation, with Toy Story in 1995. DreamWorks followed in 2001 with Shrek, which earned $484.4 million at the worldwide box office, and solidified computer animation as one of the most sophisticated and emotive forms of animation.

While computers have assisted animators in their efforts for decades, the advent of computer animation was a turning point in terms of the type of technology animation studios needed to use. Until then, all of their animation could be carried out on workstations (powerful desktop computers), but computer-generated (CG) images create such large amounts of data that animation companies now have to build their own data centres in order to handle it all.

These data centres contain hundreds of powerful servers, which provide vast amounts of processing power, enabling CG animation studios – big and small – to work with large, complex datasets and intricate 3D models. HP is one of the main providers of data centre infrastructure, alongside Dell and Cisco, and brought together some of its animation studio customers at the Cannes Film Festival to discuss the importance of technology to their businesses.

French-based Dwarf Labs, a fast-growing animation and visual effects studio, relies on a combination of workstations and data centre infrastructure from HP to do its rendering. Belisaire Earl, head of production engineering at Dwarf Labs, said that the company's latest short film, Lune et le Loup, consists of 4 minutes of animation, which equates to 7,500 frames. But each frame is 150-200 MB, so the four minutes represents about 1.5 TB of data.

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