VFX LOCKDOWN | SET- UP
ABOVE Paul Harrison, head of colour at Freefolk, enjoying his dog’s company while working from home BELOW Rob Sheridan, a nuke artist at Freefolk
working team. This changed slightly as the company found recognition and we needed a central base to address our clients, but remote working has always been in our DNA. The only challenge this time was that all of our artists had to do it at the same time, which slowed things down a bit for our flame artists, who are painting on pixels and need the speed.” Like Vine FX, Coffee & TV is also equipped with Teradici PCoIP technology. The company found that when it was using Teradici over a VPN, which is what it is generally set up with, there was a bottleneck in the connection for the flame artists and all other artists trying to access the server and render farm at the same time. “We work closely with Escape Technology, which provides engineering support, and it was able to get our Teradici system working through PCoIP for our flame artists ahead of the pandemic. It essentially outputs our graphics card into a PCI card, which, over the network, streams the pixels and displays it on the artist’s screens. It’s much quicker,” explains Moore. ART OF COMMUNICATION With visual effects artists, colourists and editors working off-site, communication is of the greatest importance. Meetings are conducted through Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom, and are done so regularly. Illingworth has a Zoom call with his team at 9.30am every morning. “The need for us to communicate and understand what everyone is doing has become really important. You can’t just have a moment of chit-chat by the coffee machine anymore.”
stating: “It’s hard to get an accurate sense of what an employee is going through when you’re not stood in front of them.” He adds: “The communication part of remote working has been the biggest challenge, because we’re a creative collaborative – no one can produce anything brilliant on their own. We’ve been working hard on ways of staying connected and being able to communicate fluidly. For example, we do company meetings every morning, individual team meetings every day and we also do interim project meetings, to communicate who’s doing what and find out what is and isn’t working.”
Morning meetings are kept to 30 minutes maximum, because Illingworth understands the need for more flexibility at this difficult time: “We’re asking a lot of employees to be in their houses all day; they might have children or pets to care for, and they’re juggling that on top of work. It’s contained when you’re in an office; you go to work and that’s your work life, and then you go home and that’s your home life. So, we’ve removed some of the set hours from people’s weeks; they can take lunch or go for a walk whenever they want to.” Moore is also someone who misses those nuanced coffee-machine moments,
JUNE 2020 | DEF I N I T ION 07
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