The Tech Of Shrek: Inside DreamWorks Animation

It takes half a billion files to make a single DreamWorks animation. Jonathan Bray meets the woman who keeps all that data running smoothly.

- Jonathan Bray

DreamWorks is one of the most technologically advanced companies in the film industry. With titles such as Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda under its belt, its feature films have grossed more than £10 billion worldwide – and several rank among the highest earning movies of all time. When it comes to CGI and animation, the company’s tech pedigree is indisputable.

Creating and rendering 90 minutes of animation doesn’t only require significant human resource, it also demands extraordinary computing power. “By the time we’re done making one movie – just one of the films in production – we’ve crafted half a billion digital files,” said Kate Swanborg, DreamWorks’ head of technology, communications and strategic alliances, speaking to us at 2016’s Cannes Film Festival. “That’s 500 million files per film and with as many as ten films in production at any given time, that makes five billion active files.”

And that’s just storage. The processing requirements of rendering a DreamWorks animated movie are equally astronomical. “Ten thousand cores of our 20,000-core render farm will be used for one film, 24/7 for about six months straight,” explained Swanborg. “Those rendering hours will equate to around 75million CPU hours over the lifetime of the film.”

However, DreamWorks isn’t only dealing with a considerable number of files per film, but handling many different versions of those files, too. “The vast majority of that data [is stuff] you don’t need,” she said. Managing those many different file revisions and deciding what to throw away is a monster challenge in itself.