HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – 08 Jul 2010: IBM announced today that it has collaborated with Illumination Entertainment to help it meet the massive production requirements involved in creating its new computer-animated 3-D feature film, “Despicable Me.”
The film, which stars Steve Carell as a villain named Gru who hatches a plot to become the world’s greatest super villain, was developed and produced by Illumination Entertainment and is being released by Universal Studios on July 9 in the U.S.
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.
The entire space used to house the data center amounted to four parking spots in the garage of the production facility, about half of what had initially been allotted.
The studio’s iDataPlex solution included IBM’s innovative Rear Door Heat eXchanger, a water-cooled door that allows the system to run with no air conditioning required, saving up to 40% of the power used in typical server configurations. Overall, the installation included 6,500 processor cores.
“IBM is delighted to work with Illumination Entertainment on this exciting project to advance digital film-making production,” said Steve Canepa, general manager, IBM Media & Entertainment industry. “The combination of our film industry expertise and powerful, flexible and cost-effective technology solutions is helping to accelerate the adoption of new digital technologies like 3-D into the creative process of film making.”
Illumination Entertainment’s film “Despicable Me,” is being released by Universal Studios July 9. The company was founded in 2007 by Chris Meledandri, who also supervised and/or executive produced “Ice Age 1 & 2”, “Alvin and the Chipmunks”, “The Simpson Movie” and “Dr. Suess’ Horton Hears a Who.”
Visit “Despicable Me” at Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DespicableMe.
For more information on IBM, visit www.ibm.com/media