Late in 2002, [Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg] gave his technology team six months to build a network that would bring all the projects to him. By the middle of 2003, DreamWorks was fitted for 21st-century moviemaking with its Virtual Studio Collaboration system bridging Glendale and Redwood City. Headed by Derek Chan, the team built a large conference room, two smaller video rooms, and a remote editing room at each site, linking the large rooms that McGrath and Darnell used to create Madagascar with a dedicated 30-Mbps fiber-optic line, and the smaller rooms with a 24-Mbps line.

The facilities are a work of design genius. The conference rooms are identical down to the maple furnishings and wall paneling, the swivel leather chairs, and the sliding storyboard panels. Chan's team tested 30 microphones to capture the broadest range of voice timbres and 70 fabrics to identify the color match that would make the remote collaborators seem most lifelike. The rooms have enough lumens to light a movie set and are outfitted with special light scoops to reduce shadowing and to keep participants from getting "raccoon eyes." Each room contains monitors and camera controls that allow people on both ends to work on the same files, view the same footage, or easily zoom in on a face, picture, or image.

The setup creates the illusion that distant collaborators are sitting at the same table. The staff now uses the rooms for everything from story pitches to performance reviews. "I remember when we wrapped animation on Madagascar," Darnell recalls. "We gathered everyone up here in Redwood City and they did the same in LA, and we had this party with cake and champagne; but for each group, half of the party was taking place virtually."

Reader Comment: Andrew Fitzhugh from Hewlett-Packard says,

What didn't show up in the Wired article is that their close collaborator, HP, is productizing those rooms. Information Week has an article that touches on that aspect of it a bit: Link.

We have deployed several rooms internally in HP that span the globe, as well as a dedicated global data network to support them. It's a much more extensive deployment than in Dreamworks. A couple of groups in HP Labs (including mine) are developing next generation technologies for the rooms.

Dreamworks also renders portions of their movies in a data center below my office here in HP Labs, but that's tangential to the collaboration rooms.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:07:45 PM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post