“It would not have been possible a few years ago due to the complexities and the rendering.” As a facilitator among various departments on the film, Scott must ensure the cohesiveness and fluidity of various teams within the production pipeline. “Having the picture-in-picture was critical to our storytelling process,” said Marc Scott, Visual Effects Supervisor, DreamWorks Animation. The glowing screens of cell phones, tablets and televisions may be a common sight in our modern world, but in the world of animation, the job of capturing these devices poses some huge computational demands. Armstrong (Jeff Goldblum) via mobile device. Picture-in-picture animation played a key role in DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby: Family Business, as depicted in this scene where Tim Templeton (James Marsden) communicates remotely with Dr. The ability of artists to work with various iterations of the film given the technical complexities of picture-in-picture was critical, especially during the remote production process. That’s because of the film’s extensive use of picture-in-picture rendering, which entails making an animated film within the animated film that interacts with the broader world. This demand caused the production of The Boss Baby: Family Business to face even more challenges than just an early release date and a pandemic. “A large part of my role is ensuring the smooth and efficient rendering process of the film, which is only possible with critical high-performance compute power that can process and manipulate those massive logs of digital information.” Our artists formulate every single frame from scratch, which ends up producing a massive amount of data,” said Scott Chapin, Director of Infrastructure Operations, DreamWorks Animation. We don’t capture real-life images or utilize live action. “You have to remember we construct every single element in a film. Tasked with the film’s visual and immersive world-building, the team focused on elevating its ever-scaling and increasingly complex ambitions throughout the entirety of the production, despite facing the complexities of working from home during a global pandemic. When that animated film is released two months early? That’s a mammoth undertaking – one that called for 300 million compute hours, in the case of DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby: Family Business. It takes hundreds of millions of compute hours to create a CG animated film.
(from left) The Boss Baby/Ted Templeton (Alec Baldwin) and young Tim Templeton (James Marsden) in DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby: Family Business, directed by Tom McGrath.