IT Partnership Makes ‘Shrek’ Pop

Infor­ma­tion Tech­nolo­gies at UNM is one of sev­eral part­ners in a new col­lab­o­ra­tion that brings Hol­ly­wood a bit closer to New Mex­ico. The agree­ment, through Cere­link Dig­i­tal Media Group, the New Mex­ico Com­put­ing Appli­ca­tions Cen­ter, National Lamb­daRail and Dream­Works Ani­ma­tion, pro­vides an ultra high speed link con­nect­ing New Mex­ico to Hollywood.

“We have a great part­ner­ship with Hewlett Packard,” said Ed Leonard, chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer for Dream­Works Ani­ma­tion, who was in Albu­querque recently pro­mot­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tion at a pre-screening of ‘Shrek For­ever After.’ “HP hosted a tech­ni­cal advi­sory panel about two years ago and Cerelink’s CTO (Art St. George) was there and asked if we’ve ever thought about ren­der­ing remotely in New Mex­ico. He said, ‘we’re think­ing about set­ting up some capac­ity there.’ I said, ‘We’d love to do it with you, let’s fig­ure out how to get it done.’”

The Albu­querque Gigapop, or ABQ-G, a project of UNM in col­lab­o­ra­tion with New Mex­ico Insti­tute of Min­ing and Tech­nol­ogy, New Mex­ico State Uni­ver­sity, New Mex­ico Coun­cil for Higher Edu­ca­tion Com­put­ing Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices and the New Mex­ico State Agency of IT, pro­vides high band­width con­nec­tions between Encanto at the New Mex­ico Com­put­ing Appli­ca­tions Cen­ter, Cere­link and Dream­Works. With­out this con­nec­tion, the ani­ma­tions in “Shrek For­ever After” and “How to Train Your Dragon” could not have been ren­dered in New Mex­ico. Ren­der­ing is the process for apply­ing light and color to films.

“We cre­ate visual tar­gets and visual devel­op­ment art­work that rep­re­sents how the film should look,” Leonard said. “Then you basi­cally develop com­puter algo­rithms to light and color the film under artist control.”

“Mak­ing a CG ani­mated film requires a lot of tech­nol­ogy,” Leonard said. “The part­ner­ship gives us capac­ity to remotely ren­der, so we don’t have to build out expen­sive data cen­ters on our cam­pus. For our peak demand, we can actu­ally use remotely the ren­der­ing resources here.”

The GigaPop was designed and imple­mented as a high­tech con­nec­tion for research and edu­ca­tion between rural and urban insti­tu­tions in New Mex­ico. It serves as an essen­tial link for reser­va­tions, schools, hos­pi­tals and emer­gency ser­vices, reduces net­work costs for mem­bers and con­tributes to eco­nomic development.

“We like this as a cost effec­tive way of ren­der­ing,” Leonard said. “There’s a lot of ben­e­fit for bring­ing it into New Mex­ico. Cost of power is a lot cheaper here. The state rebates and incen­tives, all of that adds up to Cere­link being able to offer some­thing that is quite a valu­able propo­si­tion to us.”

Media Con­tact: Steve Carr, (505) 277‑5920; e-mail: scarr@unm.edu