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The door that is always open to the imagination, a place where everything is possible. These are cartoons for children but also, why not, for adults who feel the call of childhood. The demand for content has exploded with the rise of streaming and so cartoons have become increasingly popular for providing compelling stories, quickly and without the constraints of traditional production.

The artists at high-end animation studio
Atomic Cartoons
are more than happy to bring these stories to life, creating relatable episodic series for preschoolers and adults in a wide range of genres. With more than a thousand artists in different locations in Vancouver, Ottawa , and Los Angeles, Atomic Cartoons began to run into compute resource limitations and turned to solution integrator
DeadDrop Labs
to help the studio scale its pipeline on
Amazon Web Services
.

Since its inception in 1999, Atomic Cartoons has primarily rendered using its own co-located infrastructure and has rented nodes from local suppliers during peak production. As the studio has grown and rendering needs have increased, the limitations of this approach prompted Hanoz Elavia, IT director at Atomic Cartoons, to look to the Cloud. “If my local supplier doesn’t have nodes when I need them, I’m stuck ,” said Hanoz Elavia And not being able to scale puts our productions at risk. AWS gives us the flexibility to launch the cloud, use the instances, and reactivate them. No matter what we need, AWS is likely to have the instances because of its high compute capacity.”.

After evaluating the Cloud service providers, the Canadian cartoon giant decided to rely on AWS trying to operationalize the implementation of the studio’s Cloud as soon as possible by opting for the integration of DeadDrop Labs solutions to create a custom interface between AWS and Pixar Tractor, which the studio uses for the management of the render farm. The configuration allows the studio to leverage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) without a major overhaul. “We use Tractor across all of our sites, and we didn’t want to redo the entire pipeline to access the cloud,” explained Hanoz Elavia. “Bert and the team at DeadDrop Labs were very helpful in our setup and the implementation was seamless. We started with the Vancouver studio. Now we’re working on expanding everything at the company level.”

With the integration in place, AWS has quickly become a highly valued resource for Atomic Cartoons, particularly for the 2D work, which the studio
plans to render almost entirely on AWS. “It may seem strange to start so big ,” said the Atomic Cartoons chief But scalability is too important to us, so we wanted to test its limits. At this point, our only limitation is connectivity, and we’re working on implementing an AWS Direct Connect to scale even more. We use what we need on AWS and when we need it, so
We reduce everything so that we only pay for the resources used.”