 hardware failures in any individual node. And you can get started with DynamoDB for free. So when you're ready to take your database to cloud scale, visit our website and sign up for the free tier of service today. Hey, Volante of wikibon.org. And this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship product. We go out to the shows. We extract the signal from the noise. We bring you the best guests that we can find. We like to call them tech athletes. We love sports and allergies here at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE. I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. Jeff, we're here all day, breaking down the analysis. Ryan Tudhope is in the house, co-founder of Atomic Fiction. Ryan, welcome. Thank you so much. It's so really impressive what you guys have set up here. It's incredible. We were talking about it right before the show and I'm stoked. Bob Humboldt, especially given your business. So you were at the keynote this morning. I think I told you we had a split because we were going live. But tell us about your company. Tell us about what you talked about in the keynote and we'll get into the cloud and how it's transforming your business. Absolutely. Well, huge opportunity, obviously, to be a part of Amazon's keynote today. Incredible conference and really appreciate the opportunity to be here. My company, Atomic Fiction, was founded about two years ago with my business partner, Kevin Bailey and I. And it's scary to say how old we are now, but we, I guess, are considered VFX veterans by the time we started our company. So we had a great opportunity to get a lot of work under our belt and really kind of understand the industry pretty well. But one of the things that we really realized was that talent is the most important thing when it comes to doing visual effects and animation, which is what our business is. And so we were able to form the company around some really great people and get some really great clients and kick the company off in a big way, about two years ago. Yeah, so some of the recent noteworthy accomplishments. I mean, flight, you'd want a big award for flight. Absolutely. If you haven't seen the movie I'd like to fly, I don't see it. I'm gonna put it that way, because it's so realistic. I mean, just amazing. Oh, thank you. I actually read a lot of scripts on airplanes because I'm traveling back and forth to LA a lot. And so I'll read a lot of scripts on airplanes just to kind of get in. And I sat there with the script for flight and I said, okay, I'm gonna actually do this. I'm gonna get through this script while I'm flying. It was tough, but I did. So you did flight visual effects for Transformers 3 and a number of other hit films. Last year, we also did Looper with Ryan Johnson, which was an incredible opportunity. He's an amazing filmmaker. So yeah, we've had a good time. Outstanding. So talk about how you're using AWS, the cloud, what it means for your business, and we'll get into a little bit more detail. Yeah, absolutely, sure. Well, so like I was saying, Kevin and I had worked on a lot of films and worked with a lot of great filmmakers and a lot of great films. And we also worked at a lot of big companies and small companies throughout the last 10 or 15 years. And we kind of spotted the trends of what was really working in large shops and what was working in small shops. In a big company, you have a lot of resources and a big pipeline and you're able to do a lot of work over the course of a period of time, but there's a lot of barriers and departments and things that are a little slower as a result. At a small shop, you might just have a few guys in a room where a dozen guys and gals in a room doing the work and you can't get as much done necessarily because you don't have a lot of that big pipeline and infrastructure, but things are more nimble and there's a little more of a rebellious attitude and it's a little more fun. You just get a lot done. And so two years ago when we founded Atomic Fiction, what we really wanted to do was combine the best of the big shop with the best of the small shop. We wanted that big facility infrastructure but that vibe and energy of a small company. And so that's how Atomic Fiction was born. And around that time, Amazon was obviously upping their offerings with AWS. And that really represents to a large degree a big component of that big shop pipeline that we're talking about. It allows us to do, which we can get into, have the computer resources that we need in order to get through a lot of work really quickly and still be a relatively small company and play with the big boys. So when you got started, you basically said, okay, we can't do this anywhere else. We got to have something like Amazon's cloud. So what happened? You funded the company or talk about the early days and how you started out. Well, I'm curious, when you kind of mapped it out with your partner, what kind of capital expense line item were you looking at to try to fund the type of company that you wanted to create and support the creativity levels? Right. Well, so looking at the cloud as a way to render, rendering, I should also back up real quick. I mentioned, is just absolutely critical to our industry and what we do because it's basically like, I like to, the analogy I like to use is it's like paint drawing for the artist. We need to render in order to see the work that we've been doing all day. And then we need to look at that together and we need to comment on it and iterate and refine. And so we're constantly rendering all day long and we need a lot of horsepower to be able to do that. So as a visual effects company starting up from scratch, if you know that you have the potential for a lot of customers right off the bat, you essentially have two choices. You can build your own local infrastructure, which in the case of us would have cost millions of millions of dollars in order to support the types of films that we knew we'd be working on. Or what is now kind of a new revelation in the world is being able to treat computing power more like a utility where you only pay for what you use. And so it was kind of a no brainer for us because we unfortunately didn't have millions of millions of dollars to pour into a render farm. So it came out a little bit of a need, a necessity, but also just trying to figure out how to be more nimble and lower our costs and make sure that our customers' dollars were making it up on the screen for everyone to see rather than in our server rooms, air conditioning unit, trying to keep everything cool if that makes sense. Okay, so what did you need to enable that business? So if you had to do it yourself, you'd get some guys to an IT infrastructure, you'd obviously have some application development guys and the like, what did you need to get started? Yeah, well we got very lucky. We started talking about this cloud stuff to some of our contacts in the industry really early on. And we met a group that was very early in very early stages of developing a platform that sat between the AWS cloud and was really focused at specifically what we wanted to do which was render in the cloud. And the company is called Zinc, Z-Y-N-C. And we had been partners with them basically for about a year and a half or two years throughout this whole process. They had made great traction developing this tool that would allow artists to render in the cloud. And we approached them and they approached us and we kind of realized this is a perfect marriage because we have some big projects coming through, we can really put it through its paces and test it out. They had a need for some partners to kind of do exactly that. And so for all the projects that we worked on but most notably flight, we entirely rendered that entire project in the cloud using Zinc. It was beta all the way through and then now it's actually released and I think they're slowly bringing on customers. So all of your viewers and anyone who's interested in computer graphics can actually access this. So they're a tool set in between you and the Amazon cloud? That's right. Kind of like a heat shield? Exactly, a heat shield, yeah, absolutely. And we worked with them and we created a lot of the custom glue between the apps that we use, Autodesk products such as Maya, 3D Studio Max, the Foundry has products like Nuke which we use for compositing. And so our developers were able to create the custom glue to make that work really well with their application Zinc and to interface with our asset manager and a bunch of nerdy things that I won't get into. But basically just to make it really efficient for a visual effects company and then we were able to in our agreement with them give them that stuff so that everyone can use it. And so it's really a product that's ready to go. And we'll give you time to geek out a few more. No, no, no, no. I'm not qualified to be an official there. I do want to go a little geek though and just, you know, flight is, it's obviously it's not an animated movie, right? So you're doing visual effects that need to look real. Absolutely. We hope so, yeah. So I would imagine the computational requirements go up by another huge amount. I mean, just to give people some type of feel for scale. Yeah. You know, can you throw out some numbers in terms of, I don't even know how you measure it. When you're doing a really heavy horsepower job, you know, how, how much do you spin up, how quickly, how long does it run and then how much, you know, you shut it back off. Yeah. Well, it's absolutely right. So there's two things to answer to your question. One is just when it comes to doing something that is a live action movie, visual effects that need to look photoreal. Really, really, yeah, really what that means is that you just need to iterate on it more and more and more. And I always talk about this last 10%, which is that it's pretty easy to get something looking pretty good, you know, in about 90% of the way there. But that last 10% is in order of magnitude harder than everything before it. And in other words, we really critique each other and sit in a room and look at something and talk about the way the light glints off of a wing or how foggy the window is or how much dirt is around the edges of the frame. And as a result of all those notes and that noodling, as we call it, we end up rendering and over and over and over again. So you see this huge spike in our render needs toward the end of a project when we're kind of getting to that kiss of love, that last 10% that we try to put into all of our shots. On flight, the visual effects production schedule was about six months long. And over the course of that six months, we calculated that we rendered about 1.15 million core hours in the Amazon Cloud to finish that project. What's really interesting is that we used almost half of all of those core hours in the last 30 days of production. So here's the important piece of information for everyone that's listening. So if you need to build a local render farm to handle that huge spike that happens at the end of the project, you basically are going to not be using all those machines for most of the time, basically five months out of the six, in the case of flight. But because Amazon is seemingly endless, I don't know how many machines they have, but I couldn't use them all, right? We were able to basically rent what we need, when we need it, and then at the end of the project we drop it right back off to zero and we literally close the door and get out in our car and go have a glass of wine. It's that mirror at S-curve that Andy shows, Andy Johnson shows. Absolutely, so for a visual effects company like us that's trying to be nimble and use our customer's money for images rather than our overhead, it's a game changer, and it's one of the things that we've been doing to try to change our industry. And so you're competing with the big shops. Talk about competition in your business a little bit. How is it structured? Well, it's interesting, it's one of the few industries that is very friendly. In other words, because it's very project-based, we share a lot of the same talent between companies. People will jump around a lot, people will work at different companies, and it is really a very friendly industry, and it's a very challenging industry, so we all band together in a way. So it's not so much that we're competing with the big boys and it's more that we're working alongside them, and AWS has allowed us to be able to work on projects that are really big, such as the Star Trek to the World and Flight, and these big projects that ordinarily we wouldn't be able to do as a small company. So you're able to add value in that chain as a small company, which you're saying normally they would have to go to a larger company with greater installed physical resources to be able to do that. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the big visual effects companies in the world are 800 to 1,000 employees, and we're 30. So we're an order of magnitude smaller, and yet because of the things that we're doing, the efficiency that we have in our pipeline, we're able to still get that work done very cost effectively and it still looks amazing. Yeah, I was going to say they probably have to map their human capital to their technology capital to make it all balanced, so they've got enough stuff to try to use those assets as much as they can, where you can flex human capital just as much as you can flex technology capital based on your workload or the requirements. Well, that's exactly right, and actually that's a really good point is that this is actually really more kind of like a story and the reason we went to the cloud is more of a people thing than a technology thing because we realized over the course of supervising in our careers that if I'm the visual effects supervisor on a movie, for example, Looper, and there's a shot of a spaceship that's flying over the camera and it does whatever, I know that I have to really cast that well. I have to find the right people to do that work, and if I don't find the right people to do that work, it doesn't matter how good I am. It's really all about casting when you're in a management position. And so realizing that we wanted to build the company with just rock star awesome people and which we've been fortunate enough to be able to do, but obviously we didn't want to cut costs on our talent, but we still needed to remain competitive and that's why looking at the technology differently was what enabled that. I wonder, Ryan, if you could help us squint through some of the discussions that are going on in the industry and certainly within the Wikibon community, some people have said, for example, sometimes I have a tough time predicting what my monthly bill is going to be. How do you deal with that uncertainty or that variability or is it just not exist? Are you able to forecast that very accurately? I'm specifically talking about the AWS bill at the end of every month. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's funny, I was actually just talking to one of the founders of Mailbox about this right before the keynote. It's, we're in a little bit of a different industry. There's kind of the traditional tech startup that's using AWS that will suddenly blow up and they have no idea how much it's going to cost and it becomes a big issue. Because we're, our business model is a little bit more project based and we're, we kind of know what we're getting into prior to getting into the work. We know that there's going to be 150 shots. We know that the shots are, you know, five big shots of an airplane crashing and 30 shots from inside the cockpit and we just have it all laid out and we're, because that's our business, we're very good at estimating the amount of time it's going to take on the artist's side and also on the technology front to get that work done. And so we basically calculate how many iterations on average it takes to render a certain type of shot. We know kind of how long it takes per frame to render on a certain type of instance in the cloud and we're able to calculate essentially what our render budget needs to be for a given project and that's what we... So that's, okay, and you've got a lot of data now that you can probably get very accurate on that. Absolutely. What's on Amazon's to-do list from your standpoint? Well, you know, it's amazing. Every time they come out with a new press release they've lowered the cost of their instances. If they keep doing that, we're going to be happy. I mean, it's incredible what their commitment to their customers and how they are really transparent about that stuff. You know, one of the big trends and I don't... I guess one of the big things, kind of the holy grail of computing in general and especially for visual effects is to actually move not just the rendering into cloud but move the applications themselves and to really just have a monitor and interface that you're using so that your day-to-day workflow is powered by all of those machines rather than the computer under your desk. I think that's the next big revolution in the cloud. That deeper integration into your workflow. Absolutely. Literally, you don't have a processor anywhere near your company. It's all about... Big fat pipes. Yeah, big fat pipes. Awesome. All right, Ryan, well listen, thanks very much. We really appreciate you stopping by and telling the story about atomic fiction. Congratulations and best of luck. Thank you. A real honor to be here. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. Take care, Ryan. Keep watching everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE from AWS Summit Live at Moscone in San Francisco. Thank you. For most businesses, you need lots of data storage to allow your applications to run smoothly and ensure your data is backed up and secure. That means that every time you add an application...