LONDON – BAFTA and multi-award winning VFX and animation studio Jellyfish Pictures has announced the opening of a new virtual animation facility in Sheffield. The move continues Jellyfish Pictures’ pioneering efforts after creating Europe’s first virtual VFX studios back in 2017. The new site is the company’s fifth studio in the UK and is in addition to Jellyfish Pictures’ established studios in Fitzrovia, Central London, Brixton, South London and Oval, South London.
With no hardware housed onsite, Jellyfish Pictures’ Sheffield studio, situated in the city center within the state-of-the-art Cooper Project Complex, will operate in a completely PC over IP environment
.
With all technology and pipeline housed in a centrally based co-location, the studio is able to virtualize its distributed workstations through Teradici’s remote visualization solution
,
allowing for total flexibility and scalability
.
The Sheffield site will sit on the same logical LAN as the other four studios, providing access to the company’s PixStor Software Defined Storage (SDS) from Pixit Media, enabling remote collaboration and support for flexible working practices. With the rest of Jellyfish Pictures’ studios all TPN (Trusted Partner Network) accredited, the Sheffield studio will follow in their footsteps, utilizing PixStor’s multi-tenancy container services for audit-compliant secure data separation and isolation.
The innovative studio will be headed up by Jellyfish Pictures’ newest appointment, Animation Director Kevin Spruce. With an impressive career spanning over 30 years, Spruce joins Jellyfish Pictures from Framestore, where he oversaw a team of 120 as the company’s head of animation. During his time at Framestore, Spruce worked as animation supervisor on a roster of blockbuster feature films including Fantastic Beasts
and Where to Find Them, The Legend of Tarzan and
Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to his 17-year stint at Framestore, Spruce held positions at Canadian animation company Bardel and Spielberg helmed feature animation studio Amblimation.
Jellyfish Pictures’ northern presence will start off with a small team of animators working on the company’s original animation projects, with a view to expand its team and set up with a large feature animation project by the end of the year.
Phil Dobree, CEO of Jellyfish Pictures, said of the expansion, “We have multiple projects coming up that will demand crewing up with the very best talent very quickly. Casting off the constraints of infrastructure, which traditionally has been the industry’s way of working, means we are not limited to the London talent pool and can easily scale up in a more efficient and economical way than ever before. We all know London, and more specifically Soho, is an expensive place to play, both for employees working here and for the companies operating here. Technology is enabling us to expand our horizon across the UK and beyond, as well as offer talent an out of living in the big city.”
Spruce added, “After 30 years working in and around Soho, it was time for me to move North and settle in Sheffield to achieve a better work life balance with family. After speaking with Phil, I was excited to discover he was interested in expanding his remote operation beyond London. With what technology can offer now, the next logical step is to bring the work to people rather than always expecting them to move south. Acting now as animation director for Jellyfish Pictures Sheffield, it's our intention to recruit a creative team here to strengthen the company’s capacity to handle the expanding slate of work currently in-house and beyond.
I am very excited to be part of this new venture north with Jellyfish. It's a vision of how creative companies can grow in new ways and access talent pools further afield.”