The last speaker to take the stage at the recently concluded AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas during Day 1 was Kevin Baillie, Co-founder and VFX Supervisor with Atomic Fiction. Kevin’s business path and life story resembles the very nature of his line of work, seeming like something one would only encounter in a movie.

Kevin Baillie and Ryan Tudhope, Atomic Fiction co-founders, met as children and shared a love for movies and a passion for all things tech. It was only during High School that they discovered these two areas could be overlapped. They started studying 3D computer animation with a very talented and inspiring high school teacher. Soon after they started working with Microsoft. Two days after graduating high school, they were hired by Lucas Films to work on Star Wars, Episode I.

“We have a cool job; it’s awesome,” grinned Baillie after presenting a short body of work in front of the eight thousand attendees.

From passion to business success

It takes more than luck to make it in such a competitive field. As Baillie explained, it took leveraging all the things they’ve learned so far and finding the perfect balance between that knowledge and the flow of new ideas. It also took recognizing what was really important for the business.

“The people are the most important part of the process. The technology and the economics are only there to serve the creativity process,” stated Baillie.

Technology is just an enabler, not a scope

“When we started our business we knew what we didn’t want to do. We didn’t want to have a room filled with expensive hardware that was difficult to cool. We wanted to make sure that every bit of resources that we had was going towards these really cool creative people,” said Kevin Baillie. “Right from the get-go, we decided that we were going to use AWS for all of our computing needs – and we have a lot of them,” emphasized Baillie.

As we all know, the most intensive process in VFX is the rendering. Not only is rendering hogging up a lot of resources, but it can also take a lot of time. Luckily, AWS can make a lot of difference.

“Using AWS we create a render farm, a virtual data center. And we can be Pixar-sized in one moment and then, the minute we don’t need that level of infrastructure, we can go right back down to the iMac that’s sitting on an artist’s desk. It’s really remarkable how we can scale using this tool,” marveled Kevin Baillie. “We only pay for what we use, and the fact that we don’t have any physical restraints on our computation ability means that we don’t have any physical limits on our creativity.”

What AWS allowed in Atomic Fiction’s case was achieving a faster turnaround without having to pay more and, subsequently, a better workflow. AWS is used to quickly render the special effects, allowing the creative team to see the end result almost immediately after they finished working on something.

“Our promise to the directors is that every dollar that they spend with us is going to end up on that movie screen,” said Baillie. “We take that promise very seriously and AWS allows us to come through on that promise in a very honest way.”

Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President with Amazon Web Services, concluded Day 1 of the keynote reinforcing that message: “Don’t be denied, go out and make it happen, knowing that we’re always going to be there for you.”