Case Study | Performance & Productivity

Letting Imagination Soar with Lenovo P620 and Flying Bark Productions

Close your eyes and think back to your childhood – it’s a summer afternoon and you’ve returned home from school. You turn on the television and your favourite cartoon is on; a show you could spend hours watching, and you have, not only because it’s entertaining, but because it captures your imagination.

It is this feeling that Flying Bark Productions, Australia’s leading producer of family-focused animated content, prides itself on delivering. The team at Flying Bark Productions believes animation has a unique ability to free the imagination and create magical moments that last a lifetime.

The Creative Toolbox: Harnessing Technology for Imagination

To capture this special feeling, the artists and producers at Flying Bark Productions need access to best-in-class technology that assists in creating animations which push the boundaries of the viewer's imagination.

CEO of Flying Bark Productions, Barbara Stephen says, “At Flying Bark Productions, we produce premium animations for TV shows and feature films for audiences all around the world.”

“Our work with clients like Marvel, Netflix, Disney, and Lego constantly sees us pushing the limits of our creative output and we depend on reliable, specialised equipment to do so, which positions us at the interface between creativity and technology,” she adds.

Growth and Expansion: Adapting to the Demands of Animation

With the increase in popularity and demand for quality animated content, the team at Flying Bark Productions is busier than ever. Over the last three years, the company has introduced three new departments: Lighting, Rendering and Compositing, all the while growing its team to 400 producers and artists working between its studios in Australia and Los Angeles.

During this period of growth, it became clear that connectivity, reliability, and versatility were of the utmost importance for efficient operations, at which point Chris Ord, Head of IT at Flying Bark Productions, brought onboard the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 as their daily workhorse.

“The new departments require a specific level of engineering and need to be on the edge of what’s available. The combination of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 and NVIDIA’s Quadro® RTX graphics platform has proven to be both reliable and consistent in delivering what we need.”

“Our team loves working on these devices because they are powerful enough to do whatever we need them to. You can throw whatever you need to throw at them, and they handle it effortlessly,” said Ord.

Optimising Workflow and Unleashing Creativity

With most TV production cycles running much longer than feature films, the need to future-proof is always a concern for IT teams. However, with the inherently customisable design of the P620, these concerns no longer present a challenge.

“The ThinkStation P620 workstation has been purpose-built to offer uncompromising power and performance in the most demanding of environments. The combination of the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper PRO with the NVIDIA® Quadro® RTX professional graphics make the P620 the perfect choice for any production activity, including animation” said Pankaj Gupta, Workstation Business Development Manager at Lenovo.

“The best thing about the P620 is that we know it will continue to perform for the entire duration of the project, rather than worrying about it being out of date halfway through. It's a solution we can bank on going forward,” added Ord.

Furthermore, the customisability of the ThinkStation P620 has allowed it to be optimised for a variety of use cases across all types of workflows. As a result, Flying Bark Productions has been able to reduce idle time, which would otherwise be spent waiting for designs to compile or render – this has had a significant impact on the employee experience, with artists and creators now having more time to focus on their creative output without worrying about the technology failing.

“Creativity is at the heart of what we do at Flying Bark Productions, and we absolutely need the technologies to support us in our creative endeavours - that’s where Lenovo is playing a pivotal role. We are excited to continue our partnership with Lenovo and deliver exceptional animated content for our clients and audiences,” said Stephen.

To find out more about the ThinkStation P620, contact a Lenovo representative today!