Wrong Trousers, Right Solution: Escape helps Aardman update CGI pipeline

Aardman Animations needs no introduction. A national treasure, the Bristol-based studio has produced many much-loved, award-winning stop-motion films for decades. Characters like Morph, Shaun the Sheep, and Wallace & Gromit are iconic representations of the craft of stop-motion animation.

But it’s not all clay and cameras. Like any other film, Aardman’s stop-motion marvels need post-production to make them properly shine.

“We’re known as a stop-frame company, but as part of that, we have quite a large CGI infrastructure as well for VFX and post-production tasks,” says John Morrissey, Production Engineering Manager at Aardman Animations. “Basically, it’s a clean-up of the photographic images that we take on the studio floor.”

There’s also a need for CG scenes to be blended into stop-motion frames. “In some of the films we’ve done, particularly where you have a lot of background characters milling around, we would use CGI to render those characters and composite them into the scene,” says Morrissey. “You’d still have the proper stop-frame animation in the foreground, but we use our CGI infrastructure for crowd scenes and effects in the background.”

Part of that infrastructure is a sizeable render farm of 100 machines, on-prem and in high demand. However, this was getting long in the tooth, and with the shift to Windows 11, the existing servers just couldn’t deliver.

But when Aardman set out to modernise this render capacity, the brief went well beyond simply adding more compute. The studio needed a platform that could handle a broad slate of work, including commercials, short films, TV series and feature films while supporting a growing mix of onsite and remote artists. This included a need to replace older generation rackmount workstations used by artists and as remote-accessible workstations over P2P solution Parsec.

Cost, density, power, and flexibility all had to be considered alongside raw performance.

Morrissey turned to specialist reseller Escape Technology for a targeted, smart solution. As well as having a reputation as trusted technology partners – rather than just box shifters – Escape had previously helped guide Aardman successfully through a major transition from a Linux-based pipeline to Windows.  

“Escape understands our world,” he says. “They’re very experienced in VFX and animation, so when we describe a problem, they already know what has worked for other studios.”

It was a straightforward ask: replace ageing hardware that could no longer be updated, but instead of pushing a fixed configuration, Escape took Aardman’s requirements and translated them into specific, real-world solutions.

“Escape sourced exactly what we were looking for,” says Morrissey.

Down on the farm

The first task was finding replacements for the render farm. It had to be like for like –beefy CPU-driven servers. Cloud wasn’t an option.

“Everything in animation takes so much time. When you look at the costs involved with cloud, it doesn’t take very long before it’s actually cheaper to buy the machines,” says Morrissey. “Something like a feature film could be 18 months to two years long, so you very quickly go through that point. We’ve looked at cloud rendering many times, but as soon as you add up the costs, we could have bought the machines many times over.”

The brief, not a sales catalogue, drove the conversation with Escape. “It was very much led by what we fed in as the specification,” says Morrissey. “This is the requirement, this is what we need it to do, what have you got? And then they came back with suggestions.”  

The approach gave Morrissey confidence that the recommendations were genuine. “They’ve got a lot of experience across the areas that we work in. If we have a requirement, they can generally advise what works, what doesn’t work, and what has worked for other people as well.”

With Escape’s help, Aardman replaced its older render systems with Lenovo ThinkSystem 1U servers, which Morrissey says are now being used as “purely CPU render” machines on the farm.

Geared for success

As well as looking for a direct replacement for the rackmounted PCs, Morrissey wanted to create a more flexible pool of machines that could serve as both artist workstations and render nodes depending on production demands. They had to have high memory capacity, offer strong GPU performance for VFX and clean-up, support emerging AI-assisted tools, and offer on-prem cost and power efficiency.  

Working to Aardman’s spec, Escape supplied Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra workstations. These are compact devices deployed in 5U rack enclosures containing up to seven systems. They offer up to 128 GB of RAM and NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada GPUs.

“We went to Escape with a clear set of requirements, and they came back with hardware that just fit,” he says. “The P3 Ultras were the only small-form-factor machines we could get with 128 GB of RAM and the GPU performance we needed.”

Morrissey says other vendors could match the form factor and GPU, but typically only up to 64–96 GB of RAM. The P3 Ultra hit the required 128 GB mark. They generate less heat, easing cooling demands.

“Escape lent us one to test; we were very impressed with it,” says Morrissey. “So when we were looking to replace, that’s why we went with Escape’s suggestion. Those devices are actually slightly more dense than the 1U servers, because you can get seven in a 5U rackmount enclosure, rather than having to take up 7U of space.”

Day and night

According to Morrissey the P3 Ultras have two roles, acting as standalone or remote-access workstations during the day and switching to GPU render nodes overnight.

This dual-role flexibility of the P3 Ultras is especially valuable given the remote aspects of Aardman’s workforce. “It’s pretty close to a 50/50 split between off-site and on-site; it very much depends on the production,” says Morrissey.  

In day-to-day use the machines have not disrupted workflows so much as accelerated them. “The machines are more powerful than the previous workstations, they’re quicker, so we can get more renders through in any given period,” says Morrissey. “And as more machine learning-based tools become part of the workflow, the GPU in there means they can support some of those tasks as well, including training models for Foundry’s CopyCat in Nuke.”

“They’re a lot more power efficient than a lot of the kit we have in the comms room,” he adds. “They don’t generate as much heat, and they’re nowhere near as thirsty in electric terms.”

The size of the P3 Ultras does involve a modest performance trade-off, but one Morrissey considers well worth making. “They’re not that far behind the 1U rack render machines. They’re not quite as powerful, mainly because the small-form-factor graphics card hasn’t quite got as many cores as the full-size version. But short of the very, very high-end VFX work, they can do pretty much everything the artist wants. For general clean-up or basic animation, they’re actually great.”

If larger broadcast commissions arrive, he already has expansion in mind. “If we were doing a series, for example, we would probably buy another 15 or 20 of the P3 Ultra workstations. We have a finite number of seats in the building, so once we fill those up, the proportion of remote artists increases. That’s where the workstation-by-day, render-farm-by-night scenario comes in.”

Looking ahead, Aardman is also keeping a close eye on Escape's Sherpa cloud bursting service for moments when production deadlines demand a short-term surge in render capacity.

"Escape gave us a look at it as a demo,” says Morrissey. “It solves a lot of the issues that we’d have if we just went with AWS or Azure or someone like that. It's a lot of work for us to put in before we actually get anything, whereas Escape has done a lot of the donkey work. So if we needed to do burst rendering, just to increase our capacity for a week or two to get a job out the door, we would certainly consider using Sherpa."

Creature comforts

“We’re very happy with the performance of the machines, and they’re proving quite reliable,” says Morrissey. The support relationship with Escape gives him added confidence should anything change.  

"The kit's quite new, so we've not really had any issues," says Morrissey. "But when we've dealt with Escape in the past and needed support, they've always been there and been good."

For a studio where every frame is crafted by hand, having technology partners you can rely on without thinking about it could prove just as valuable as the hardware itself.

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