Azken Muga, part of the success of 'The Adventures of Tadeo Jones'

La granja de render empleada en la cinta más taquillera de animación de este año tiene el sello de esta empresa española.

A punto de cerrar el año y de hacer balance, The Adventures of Tadeo Jones se consolida como la cinta de animación más vista de 2012, y como la segunda película más taquillera, tras Impossible, with more than 17 million euros collected at the box office. In fact, its creators are already talking about a sequel. But what is behind this commercial success? Without a doubt, in addition to an important creative team, a strong (and successful) marketing campaign, we must not forget the merit of the technical aspect. It is an animated film, and as such, the technical work must be impeccable.

The Last Frontier has been part of this process and this success, and has done so through its teams: it has been the provider of the internal render farm of Lightbox Entertainment, one of the producers of Tadeo Jones y responsable de todo el diseño visual y animación de la película, participando así en uno de los procesos clave de toda cinta de animación.

Para Enrique Gato, director de Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones, “una de las bazas más importantes de los equipos de Azken que destacaría es su fiabilidad. Son absolutamente fiables y han respondido a nuestras demandas, que son muy exigentes. Han estado encendidos 24 horas, los 7 días de la semana, con una alta carga de trabajo, y han respondido. Desde luego, en los últimos dos o tres años han recibido una carga brutal de trabajo y han dado la talla. Y ahora mismo los seguimos empleando para nuevos proyectos”.

This project demonstrates that a Spanish SME can compete with the big ones for a project that reaches the dimensions of Tadeo Jones, which has enjoyed practically worldwide distribution and has marked a milestone, being the first Spanish film to gain mass distribution in China.

Rafael Laínez, from Azken Muga, points out that "from our point of view, LightBox has been able to make the most of the budget for rendering infrastructure, optimizing production procedures and resources to achieve artistic quality and extraordinary results. As a technology provider, we are proud to participate with them in the decision-making, benchmarking, start-up and exploitation processes, proving to be a pragmatic team of professionals with a unique level of enthusiasm and dedication."

Rendering

Azken Muga has provided LightBox with the computing equipment necessary for the digital image creation of each frame (rendering), as well as the storage servers for production. In particular, it was an AZRender render farm with high-density servers with Dual Xeon multicore technology, for a total of 1.209Ghz and 504GB of RAM. JBOD Systems with advanced RAID and Dual miniSAS connectivity have been used for storage.

It should be noted that Azken Muga has been a partner recommended by Nvidia for eight years, both as a provider of professional range solutions and as a certified integrator of workstations and advanced computing equipment, being recognized as a Tesla Preferred Partner and as one of the main technical service points in Europe.