WFH workflows are here to stay, says Watchmen VFX facility

Working from home is trend that’s here to stay according to the IT boss at one of Scandinavia’s largest VFX and animation studios.

Stockholm-based Important Looking Pirates - which has worked its magic on Netflix’s Lost in Space and HBO series Watchmen and Westworld - has always prided itself on recruiting top VFX talent from around the world.

In future, however, the firm’s head of IT Simon Cox predicted the remote working models set up during the pandemic would be used to allow it expand its pool of top artists.

Speaking during last week’s Dell sponsored IBC Showcase session, How leading companies large and small derive more value from technology, Cox said:

“The working from home situation is not going anywhere - even post Covid. We rely hugely on multinational talent but we could spread our net much wider if we didn’t require somebody to uproot and come to Sweden.”

Fellow speaker, CEO of Berlin-based Projective Technology Derek Barrilleaux predicted that there would be a growth in tools to facilitate remote working.

“The need to work from home has driven location independence and the priority will be to try to aid these multiple site projects,” he said.

“There will be world-wide teams working off a common unified asset management tools capable of pushing content out to different cities around the world,” he added.

According to Barrilleaux - whose Berlin-based firm produces asset management tool Strawberry - while there are different ways of working remotely – all methods present workflow challenges particularly around security and access.

“It’s not enough just to have a connection to a home system, you also need a way of working that enables the technology. Just because you can gain access to your facility it doesn’t mean you gain access to your media,” he said.

Cox added that in ILP’s case, his studio clients’ strict access conditions also needed to be in place for remote working.

“We have a room in our facility where we can ingest and deliver to certain clients; so we had to create a virtual version of this room that people could only access with digital passcode - just as they would a real one.”

Cox added that because his clients’ required content to remain on site, the facility is using data centres to remote into, rather than public cloud.

However, Cox said the firm was currently looking at public cloud on “a use-by-use basis”, initially for rendering and storage.