In the Press
View of Savage VFX’s current office space in Pitssburgh, PA. The OpenDrives storage solution works between the studio’s locations in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Published in VFX Voice, the magazine of the Visual Effects Society
The topic of storage for visual effects studios can be a dry one. But storage is, of course, a crucial part of the day to day operations of a VFX vendor, large or small.
One smaller studio that has embraced a robust storage solution is Savage VFX, founded in 2007 by James Pastorius and Brice Liesveld. It found itself expanding relatively rapidly and needing to operate in two locations, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
“We turned to OpenDrives while we were in the process of upgrading the L.A. office to work on The Social Network. The infrastructure we were using at the time wouldn’t have been able to keep the whole show online during the course of post-production, and would have struggled to serve down that data to workstations.”
—Brice Liesveld, Co-founder and Visual Effects Producer, Savage VFX
To deal with the expansion and multiple locations, Savage adopted the OpenDrives Summit storage product. It’s through this storage tech that the studio has worked on several feature films, such as The Social Network, Gone Girl and Lucy, as well as a number of television shows, including Mindhunter and House of Cards, and even Apple iWatch commercials. The work done at Savage ranges from 2D compositing to environment effects, matte painting, and CG work.
“We turned to OpenDrives while we were in the process of upgrading the L.A. office to work on The Social Network,” says Liesveld. “The infrastructure we were using at the time wouldn’t have been able to keep the whole show online during the course of post-production, and would have struggled to serve down that data to workstations.”