Building Creative Projects in the Cloud with House of Parliament and Gunpowder

House of Parliament, an independent VFX and creative studio, was founded in early 2020 with a vision of reimagining the concept of the traditional studio. Five years on and the company is a serial award winner working on the highest profile projects. That notoriety includes delivering nine commercials for Super Bowl 2024 in just one month. In the fast-paced world of visual effects (VFX) and creative production, their innovation and adaptability are crucial to Parliament’s success.

Underpinned by over twenty years of experience in high end visual effects, Parliament are experts in consulting, creating and executing visual content to the highest level.

Parliament’s animated work has appeared in prominent productions such as Taylor Swift’s self-directed 2024 VMA Video of the Year for 'Fortnight' featuring Post Malone, and 'Smoke and Mirrors,' awarded the 2024 Prix Ars Electronica’s 'Golden Nica' to conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe. The studio is also a finalist for VFX Company of the Year at the Ad Age Creativity Awards for campaigns including Apple’s 'Flock' directed by Ivan Zacharias for Smuggler, and LAY'S 'The Little Farmer' directed by Taika Waititi for Highdive and Hungryman.

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The Power of Collaboration for Speed and Scalability

The Parliament pipeline was built, managed and resourced by their technology partners at Gunpowder; designed to exploit the latest developments for scale, speed and collaboration.

“We are effectively their CTO,” says Founder of Gunpowder Tom Taylor, a leading systems integrator specializing in cloud virtualization solutions. Their role in visualizing and implementing Parliament’s workflow is extensive. “We build the pipelines, we operate the render farm, we help them scale and we help with all the upgrades. We manage billing to ensure projects remain on budget and that the infrastructure is on tap as required and costs don’t spiral.

The key to the success of House of Parliament’s VFX workflow is the virtualized version of Sohonet's real-time review tool ClearView Flex (aka VFlex). Taylor says: “It is exceptionally easy to set up and use which producers love. Since ClearView Flex gives peace of mind to their clients it makes Parliament happy, and it reduces a lot of engineering time for us.”

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Solving Critical Connections

A key issue was solving the critical connections for interactions between clients and artists working from home. “We’d jury-rigged open-source tools to get streams at a high enough quality to clients remotely,” reports Taylor. “To be honest we were not consistently successful. Sometimes it would work well, sometimes it would falter. And it always required an engineer to set up and do some tweaking during the session.. We found ourselves constantly trying to make it work. We did not want the clients  to notice, and it was getting to that point.”

In 2022 Gunpowder reached out to Sohonet. Taylor explains, “I knew at the time, the virtualized version of ClearView Flex (VFlex) was operating in AWS, but Parliament was on Google Cloud. Sohonet arranged for us to beta test a version of VFlex in Google and we set it up. From day number one it was like night and day.

“The producer suddenly had control. It was easy enough and clear enough that they could then manage the sessions. The clients were happy because it looked great, and they were also using a tool that they were familiar with. You can’t overestimate the importance of this. Lots of clients had used ClearView Flex all over the world and they were excited to use it when we presented it to them.

“The clients wanted it. We wanted it. Sohonet delivered it for us - in Google, specifically - so that we could move forward. We've got very smart engineers who tried to build this but in the end for peace of mind of the clients and for ourselves we ended up using VFlex and we haven't looked back.”

The result: smoother collaboration, less downtime, and happier clients.

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Benefits of VFlex

VFlex has become an essential part of Parliament’s daily workflow, allowing artists to work with Autodesk Flame, Houdini, and Maya in a virtualized environment. Its reliability in maintaining color accuracy and quality across devices has significantly enhanced client satisfaction and streamlined the creative process. 

 “Now, we didn’t need engineers to set up sessions,” says Taylor. “We are no longer relying on open-source tools that risk disrupting our workflow. Think of it this way: we had a whole chain of plug-ins that were our version of VFlex. To get that chain working took a lot of effort. And, if any one of those pieces got updated it would quite often break something else in the chain. We were operating in a  very unstable structure for sending daily reviews out on for clients, crossing our fingers to see if it would work.

“With VFlex, it’s 180-degrees different. It's a known product and clients are very comfortable with it. They know that if they’re watching a ClearView stream that it’s going to be excellent quality, and we know it's not going to lag. Plus, it’s going to be color accurate.”

Ensuring artists and clients are seeing the thing is a perennial issue with distributed workflows but not when VFlex is part of the solution.

“Colorimetry is notoriously tricky when you have some people on an iPad, others on an iPhone or laptop and sitting on the other side of the world. Getting that consistency of viewing experience is exceedingly difficult,” Taylor says. “VFlex gives us peace of mind. We know that the source signal is consistent across any device that the client wants to connect from.”

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The Cloud-First Mentality

House of Parliament launched in March of 2020 with a roster of high-profile projects signed and ready to go. Notably, this included production on multiple 2024 Super Bowl commercials. With everything set, the global pandemic enforced lockdown just one week later. 

“They weren't able to get a lease on office space or obtain infrastructure or equipment,” says Taylor. “We had to scramble, fast, and figure out how we were going to do this.”

Cloud postproduction studios were not a new concept at that time, but none had left on-premises workstations entirely. Out of necessity, Parliament had to pioneer a cloud-first mentality.

Gunpowder tackled the problem head-on, talking with cloud providers and using available infrastructure. In a matter of weeks, they had built an alpha cloud studio that enabled Parliament to scale out to 100 artists across different regions and get the commercials done and dusted for Super Bowl LV.

Post Super Bowl, still in the pandemic, Gunpowder reviewed the infrastructure and began to evolve it. “The first few months were definitely a scramble,” Taylor recalls. “We needed this to work irrespective of the issues we encountered. It was trial by fire.”

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Scale for Super Bowl

While no two projects are the same, Gunpowder built a core pipeline for Parliament that can scale. VFlex is integral to each one.

Taylor says: “Each department has a volume control in it, if you will, and depending on a job’s ebbs and flows we turn it up or down. That can be multi-region. It can be different countries. If they want to hire a specific designer who's in Australia to produce a certain look, we can get that person in front of the project within minutes. We are literally able to grab a slider bar and drag it up and get 100 extra machines online in three minutes.”

This flexibility enabled Parliament to more than triple in size to accommodate the increase in work, involving over 300 artists, 2 PB of data, and thousands of hours of rendering to complete nine spots ahead of Super Bowl LVIII 2024—all over the course of just six weeks.

“One of the nicest compliments we received from Parliament was that they didn't even have to think about doing this. The key to VFlex is that it is easy to set up. It just works. Producers love to use it, and it makes our clients happy.”

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Template for Success

Parliament recently opened a design department and is working with Gunpowder to explore the integration of real-time workflows. “Design and post workflows are traditionally kept separate but we’re bringing the two together so that our 3D artists can benefit from being able to model quickly in tools like Unreal and then bring those tools back into Maya.”

Separately, Gunpowder has taken the cloud template and applied it for clients outside media and entertainment in sports verticals for architecture firms, toy manufacturers and more.

“We not only help legacy creative VFX studios accelerate their transition to dynamic cloud-based operations and workflows, but our goal is also to free production teams to concentrate on delivering their best creative work, by taking care of the cloud infrastructure and management.”

House of Parliament’s partnership with Gunpowder exemplifies how cloud-based solutions can redefine creative production. By focusing on robust infrastructure and reliable client interactions, the studio has set a benchmark for the VFX industry, showcasing how innovation and collaboration lead to success.

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Get in touch to discuss your specific workflow needs and to demo ClearView Flex.