For BAFTA Award-winning boutique studio Milk Visual Effects, a regular day at the office can entail anything from blowing up buildings to giving life to the supernatural. Founded in 2013, the London-based visual effects company recently added a second studio in Cardiff, Wales. Known for its work across feature films and television, Milk credits include “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” “Doctor Who,” “Thunderbirds Are Go,” “The Divergent Series: Insurgent” and “Poltergeist” (2015). With a capacity of 120 artist seats and a nearly 200 node render farm between its two facilities, Milk relies on Thinkbox Software’s Deadline for scalable high-volume compute management across projects and locations.
“Choosing the right tool to manage our render farm was a key decision in forming Milk, so we looked at all our options and ultimately found that Deadline best suited our needs,” explained Milk head of systems Dave Goodbourn. “We’d all used the software before and loved it; Thinkbox takes its development very seriously and they’ve created a really amazing product that you can trust. We essentially formed our studio pipeline around Deadline.”
Whether creating massive crowds or complex simulations, every Milk artist uses Deadline on a daily basis, even if they might not realize it. “We process a ton of data through Deadline across a lot of different applications like Nuke and Maya, and we’re always looking for more to add. From caching animation to creating slap comps, converting frames and transcoding, we pass it all through Deadline so our artists don’t have to spend time waiting for commands to execute,” shared Milk head of pipeline Benoit Leveau.
Deadline also helps Milk bridge its two locations and be ready to spool up additional resources in the cloud at a moment’s notice. With machines in London and Cardiff, Deadline not only links the local farms to form a single, unified workflow but can also extend to cloud platforms for added processing power, with all components seamlessly integrated. This flexibility enables Milk to leverage any combination of physical resources, both on and off-site, and cloud resources as one cohesive farm that can easily grow to meet production demands.
“We’re continually evolving and taking on new jobs with specific needs, so it is important that we have a solution that scales. Deadline accommodates more than enough nodes; we never have to worry about overtaxing our pipeline,” Goodbourn said.
Concluded Leveau, “Deadline allows our teams to work fast and efficiently across locations. And, if we run into any issues, Thinkbox’s support is awesome. They’re available when you need them.”
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
The one rule to follow is that... Read More