Last year, Covid-19 had put the brakes on the VFX industry globally. Though there were certain challenges that the studio faced initially due to the Coronavirus outbreak, but today, studios from around the world, with optimistic attitudes are triumphing over the pandemic scene with their strategies and tools. One such studio is Jellyfish Pictures who shared their post Covid-19 scene at the VAM Summit and Awards.
The topic of the keynote was VFX & Animation – What does a Post –Covid World look like and Jellyfish Pictures CTO Jeremy Smith shared how they tackled the Covid-19 pandemic and how is the situation now, in post-pandemic.
The pandemic has shifted the dynamics; from coming to the office, doing work at the designated workstation, meeting people to working remotely. Because of it, the whole setup has changed and people have to directly depend on the technology tools to ease and sustain work from home culture. Smith added, “There is a massive uptick in cloud technologies throughout the industry to work remotely for the pandemic. We really had to ramp up certain things, be it teaming up on zoom call with the team, storage, security, and so on to work remotely. We literally had to adapt because it was illegal for people to travel during Covid-19.”
Many studios at the same time worked on strict deadlines and for Jellyfish Pictures the challenge was how they were supposed to do it. They invested heavily on the security, storage and utilising public cloud so that people get to work at ease. Over pandemic they have hired over 150 people from different countries and because of their investment, it was possible for them.
A few years back it used to be a daunting case when people thought of operating a VFX studio remotely, and now, the entire VFX service sector is functioning remotely. But none of the industry leaders thought that a total remote work setup could be possible considering the security aspects of the cloud. So while shifting the work completely, Jellyfish Pictures also experienced that. “People when working remotely don’t have access to data. All the datas are pulled back and centralized and from there we render in-house or we go to the public cloud for rendering,” added Smith.
Because of the remote work culture, the industry has transformed, however, it will get back to usual once it is normalised. He expressed, “Going forward we can see a blended approach. We would like to combine the best of the pre-Covid world and the Covid world, and we believe that this can be the way going forward. Virtualisation and cloud technology will be the key to that.”
The plus point is that they could recruit the best talents from anywhere else in the world following this strategy.