‘The Croods’ Smashes DreamWorks Records

That’s right folks. The prehistoric neanderthals have completely taken over modern people’s time. This movie, which is set in the Stone Age, has set a new record for the number of hours that it took DreamWorks to render an animated movie.

To put it in perspective:

• It took about 40 million hours to render DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens in 2009.
• Rise of the Guardians took 65 million compute hours to render.
• The Croods has blown every other animated DreamWorks movie out of the water by taking 80 million compute hours to render.

Wowza.

What’s more, DreamWorks had employed 400 animators to work on creating this movie over the last three years, and each character took 6 months to animate, and each of these characters have 2,000 control points that can be manipulated by the animator. The final film has a pixel count of over 250 billion.

I may not know a lot about the creation of an animated movie, but let me say again…

Wowza.

The images, including rough sketches to high-definition shots, required 250TB* of storage data to make, according to Kate Swanborg, head of enterprise marketing at DreamWorks.

“Storage sounds like a passive word, but it’s an active part of our infrastructure. Artists are actively accessing around the globe in our three studios various parts of data every single minute of the day,” Swanborg said.

After completing the film, DreamWorks is left with about 70TB of data, in which the company can reuse images such as plants or backgrounds in future movies. This will really help, as DreamWorks is often working on about ten films at one time.

Well, this would certainly explain The Croods’ awesome animation. Hopefully, DreamWorks will be able to continue to improve their films, so we get a lot of other awesome movies.

*For the layman such as myself, TB stands for terabyte, or 1 trillion bytes, or 1000 giga bytes. Which, in even simpler terms, is a lot of storage data. Jeez. You learn new things everyday!