Blur Studio’s Secret Level unlocks cloud rendering with AWS

Secret Level is a new adult-animated anthology series featuring original stories set within the worlds of some of the world’s most beloved video games. From the creative minds behind LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS, each of the episodes is a celebration of games and gamers.

Secret Level is created by and executive produced by Tim Miller. Dave Wilson serves as executive producer and supervising director. Produced by Blur Studio in collaboration with Amazon MGM Studios for Prime Video, the series combines in-house and partnered creations. Blur developed the Warhammer 40,000 and Unreal Tournament episodes internally, while collaborating with a global team of animation studios—DIGIC Pictures, Axis Animation, Illusorium, Platige, and Goodbye Kansas—to produce the others. To scale render capacity for its own work, Blur leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS), which also supported the render demands of vendors DIGIC Pictures and Goodbye Kansas.

“AWS solves a number of production challenges for us, the chief one being rendering,” noted Sean Cody, Blur Head of Systems, who oversees the studio’s infrastructure. “AWS is a force multiplier of our existing capabilities and gives us the flexibility to do things we couldn’t before, like quickly transferring data globally.”

“AWS gave us powerful resources to tackle unexpected hurdles,” added longtime Blur Studio Executive Producer Greg Talmage. “We’re increasingly seeing a fusion of linear and interactive storytelling, and the notion of intellectual property (IP) as entertainment is gaining traction based on past successes. Having the right technology to support the exploration of these new creative avenues is essential.”

Secret Level origins

Following a similar format to the wildly popular series Love, Death & Robots, Secret Level spans genres and animation styles. Filmmaker and Blur co-founder Tim Miller (Terminator: Dark Fate, Deadpool) created and executive produced it, with Blur’s Dave Wilson (Bloodshot) serving as supervising director and executive producer. The studio was a natural fit to develop the series, which pays homage to a wide range of beloved titles, as it’s known for creating some of the most memorable and highest caliber cinematic game trailers to ever be released. From nostalgic and independent to AAA juggernauts, Secret Level’s featured IPs offer something for every viewer, delighting hardcore fans and attracting new ones with compelling visuals and satisfying stories.

In addition to Blur’s “Warhammer 40,000” and “Unreal Tournament” episodes, the series features shorts set in the universes of Armored Core, Concord, Crossfire, Dungeons & Dragons, Exodus, Honor of Kings, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, PAC-MAN, various PlayStation entities, Sifu, Spelunky, and The Outer Worlds. The episodes were created by different visual effects (VFX) studios, while Wilson drove the overall vision for the project. Typically, the studios worked independently of each other, but occasionally they had to quickly share files with Blur. This process proved simple for partners integrated with AWS. They could transfer files with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It confirmed Blur could get data from vendors as quickly as possible, which helped keep the production moving.

“At one point, we needed data from a vendor really quickly, so we set up an S3 bucket, which made it super easy for them to drop in what was needed. If I had to build hardware to support that, it would have taken weeks. With AWS, I can problem solve immediately,” Cody shared.

Embracing new pipelines

Founded in 1995, Blur has undergone several infrastructure transformations over the years as technology has evolved. The studio is currently implementing its latest pipeline change, with cloud optimization and real-time tools a top priority. Part of that entails striking the right balance of performance and cost with the cloud, which they’ve dabbled in for four years, but began using heavily in production last year.

One driver for the studio’s adoption of AWS was increasing rendering needs. “We use AWS as an expansion of our render capacity, which I would call ‘elastic capacity,’” noted Cody. “When we hit some kind of a roadblock where we need more compute, we can offload a lot of that work onto the cloud.”

Blur rendered part of its 15-minute “Warhammer 40,000” episode with AWS, specifically Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances. Based on the most popular miniature wargame in the world produced by Games Workshop, the stunning sci-fi short focuses on two ultramarines on a suicide mission.

“The amount of work we’ve taken on to get this series out the door is staggering, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without AWS,” said Cody. “In the past, we’d get rentals when we exceeded our farm capacity, but the cloud is a game changer.”

The studio created the “Unreal Tournament” episode in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, so scalable render resources weren’t needed. However, as Blur increasingly takes on other real-time projects, Cody envisions virtual workstations on AWS will become key. He explained, “We work with artists all over the planet and we can’t expect freelancers to have the beefy hardware needed to run Unreal, nor are we going to ship workstations around the world. We have more data set control in Unreal than with traditional creative applications, so we can better manage data transfer and sync, making this a great use case for virtual workstations, which we hope to start exploring next year.”

Combining resources

Multi-vendor scenarios are common in VFX; however, collaboration among studios is often difficult due to diverse pipelines. Blur’s larger vision for the industry is to have more pipeline standardization, in particular for cloud integration, so that it’s easier to work in a unified manner on large scale projects. DIGIC Pictures and Goodbye Kansas, two other studios that worked on Secret Level episodes “Honor of Kings,” “Sifu,” and “Armored Core” by PlayStation and The Outer Worlds respectively, already supported AWS. This meant that when they ran into render limitations with their on-premises resources, Blur was able to help them quickly scale with the cloud and deliver on time.

“From a production perspective, since we’ve empowered ourselves with AWS, we have the ability to help our vendors, which ultimately benefits the end result,” Talmage noted.

Envisioning the future

Blur’s latest project in production also follows an anthology approach, giving the studio an opportunity to continue to refine its pipeline with an eye on collaboration. AWS remains a vital piece of its overall workflow, and the studio elastically scales rendering to the cloud when its on-premises farm hits capacity.

“Tracking operational spend is a lot easier with the cloud. You can forecast in real time and look at shared resources, which you can’t really do on-prem, but productions aren’t used to tracking budgets this way,” Cody explained. “Instead of completely shifting from capex to opex, we’re trying to find a middle way that brings together the best of both models.”

Emphasizing Blur’s upcoming ambitions, Talmage concluded, “We’re focused on moving from short form to longer form projects and AWS will be a big part in helping us overcome technical challenges to achieve that.”

Secret Level is now streaming on Prime Video.

Learn more about AWS services and solutions for creating, rendering, and storing content, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment representative.