Oklahoma City, OK-based boutique creative studio Boiling Point Media is equal parts marketing agency and feature film production company. Through its production arm, Boiling Point develops and produces its own IP as well as handles external projects. As projects have increasingly required digital artistry to realize the narrative, the company has scaled its visual effects team, growing from three to seven in-house artists in the last two years. To accommodate the studio’s burgeoning render needs, the VFX team implemented a cloud-based render workflow using Conductor.
“We’ve always used the cloud for rendering to some degree, but our needs have increased exponentially as we’ve been taking on more complex, higher-volume VFX shots,” said Boiling Point Senior Animator Stephanie Roach. “Conductor stands out for us because we’re able to easily execute renders, and if we run into technical issues, can resolve them quickly. This is hugely important when we’re up against delivery deadlines.”
Boiling Point first began using Conductor in production on “The Adventures of Jurassic Pet,” for which artists created a CG dinosaur from its freshly hatched stage to a full-grown prehistoric creature over the course of the movie. The studio is currently in the home stretch on a still under wraps project that features a detailed, CG furry creature; long, intense closeups of CG textures; and FX simulations. All renders are completed with Conductor, which allows artists to continue iterating, without tying up workstations. To date, they’ve spun up more than 1,000 instances with Conductor and estimate they’ll submit more than 100,000 frames through the end of the year.
“You don’t see many successful VFX houses smack dab in the Midwest, and I’m not sure we’d be able to create the sci-fi fantasy work we do within our current budgets and timelines without Conductor,” noted Boiling Point Senior VFX Artist Dan Moyer.
