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Milk VFX used cloud rendering services from AWS to create some awesome water effects for the survival thriller Adrift GETTING THE DRIFT OF CLOUD
t’s a truism that filmmaking and water don’t mix. The malfunctioning mechanical shark on Jaws , the aquatic heart of
darkness that was James Cameron’s The Abyss , or the now legendary nightmare of Waterworld – if you’re shooting on or around water, you’re asking for it. Luckily, we have an amazing array of digital tools available to us today, and all those problems are solved! Right? Alas, no. Digital water is almost as much a challenge as the real thing. Any visual effects (VFX) supervisor worth his sea salt will tell you that creating realistic digital water effects is always a challenge. London-based Milk VFX took up that challenge big-time when they embarked on the effects for Adrift , an American thriller about a young couple stranded in the middle of the ocean after a hurricane. “For Adrift, the biggest technical challenge was simulating and rendering
THE BIGGEST TECHNICAL CHALLENGEWAS SIMULATINGAND RENDERINGTHEOCEANOVERVERYLONGSHOTS
THINK ABOUT RENDERING In 2017, AWS acquired Thinkbox Software. Thinkbox offered a number of top rate tools, but what attracted AWS especially was AWS Thinkbox Deadline’s render management solution. It was originally used as an on-premises solution. Render workloads are some of the most compute- intensive for a VFX or animations studio and can require a notable amount of infrastructure, especially as VFX becomes more and more elaborate and complex.
the ocean over very long shots,” says Benoit Leveau, head of Pipeline at Milk. “The ocean surface had to be animated by hand to follow the director’s vision, and only then could we first simulate it and then render it, which means there were a lot of iterations to get it right. And with two very long shots at 3000 and 7000 frames long, we knew from the beginning that our local infrastructure would not cope with the amount of rendering required. Thus, we planned to use the cloud for rendering.”
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