Rendering with AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10

The brief

After being purchased by Amazon in 2017, the render management system Deadline experienced a radical shift in business model and brand awareness.

At Grammatik, it became a priority to highlight the benefits of AWS connectivity and EC2 Spot Instances. We launched into an integrated campaign encompassing PPC, events, social media, and an assortment of customer stories based around the brand motto “Scalable, Flexible, Powerful, Secure.”

A high-profile interview with Passion Pictures played a key part in this story, and soon became one of our most prominent success stories to date.

The story

With a focus on storytelling, animation, and characters, the Passion Pictures delivers vibrant, beautiful and imaginative content across a number of mediums. From documentaries to advertisements, feature animation and extraordinary experiential encounters (including a real-time interview with the Gorillaz), the creativity inherent in the studio is truly impressive.

The story of the studio itself is no less remarkable. Founded in 1987 by Andrew Ruhemann, Passion Pictures has gone from humble beginnings to an international footing in London, Barcelona, Paris, New York and Melbourne, while producing some of the most critically acclaimed documentary films of the last twenty years along the way.

In 2000, One Day In September won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and has continued to collect accolades. More recent films include The Imposter, Searching for Sugar Man and the Emmy award-winning Netflix TV series Five Came Back. Alongside this, the studio seems to effortlessly deliver beautiful and engaging works for names like MTV, Disney, and Marvel.

But as with all prolific studios, astounding diversity in work comes with high technical requirements. Regularly working on concurrent projects spanning international studio locations, the Passion Pictures team needs to keep operating costs under control while also meeting tight schedules. They’re reliant on software and a pipeline solution that supports heavy rendering needs – which is why they chose to scale their rendering workloads to the cloud using Deadline and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.