Emmy, VES and BAFTA Award-winning production house Jellyfish Pictures is breaking new ground by opening two new, virtual visual effects facilities in the Oval area of London — the first such studios in Europe. The new sites represent a capacity increase for a further 70 artists, adding to Jellyfish’s studios in Brixton and Fitzrovia for a total of nearly 200 employees.
Both Oval studios house animation teams, which are tackling the new CBeebies/FremantleMedia preschool series Bitz and Bob (designed and directed by Jellyfish), and the second season of hit kids’ show The Floogals. The existing animation operations at Jellyfish’s Brixton studio are currently at work on the Dennis the Menace reboot, Dennis and Gnasher.
With no hardware housed onsite, the Oval studios operate in a completely PC over IP environment and are powered by the Brixton facility, which accommodates the new studios’ servers. Exponential-e provided a 10 Gig Ethernet network, enabling Jellyfish Pictures to virtualise distributed Strongbox Technology workstations through Teradici’s remote visualisation solution and connect all four of its offices onto the same circuit. All sites sit on the same logical WAN, which provides access to Software Defined Storage (SDS) from Pixit Media and enables remote collaboration and support for flexible working practices.
“Within three years our workforce has expanded to 170 and now beyond. After running out of floor space at our first two offices in Fitzrovia and Brixton, we wanted to open a third and fourth office near The Oval. By underpinning different cloud technologies with Exponential-e’s network, we had the building blocks for a new virtual office, allowing us to simply extend the workloads that we already had to set-up our new premises,” said CTO Jeremy Smith, who spearheaded the technical side of the virtual studio project.
“The two new Oval offices are testament to how technology and creativity work hand-in-hand. The combined technology solution provided by Exponential-e gives the studio the ability to respond quickly to spikes in demand and treat resources as if they are all centralised, regardless of whether they are based on private or public cloud storage,” added CEO Phil Dobree. “With Jellyfish’s accelerated business growth, we now have the capacity to scale computing power and deploy virtual workstations in an instant, to execute even the most demanding of projects.”
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