18th
Despicable Me
I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I was somewhat surprised to discover that it was produced by a company I’d never heard of: Illumination Entertainment. IBM apparently had a hand in rendering the animation, saying:
For “Despicable Me” the animation process generated 142 terabytes of data — an amount roughly equivalent to the traffic generated by over 118 million active MySpace users or 250,000 streams of 25 million songs.
I’m not sure why MySpace traffic is a benchmark for data usage, but I find it fascinating that the movie involved 330 animators/producers/staff and used 6,500 processor cores in a dedicated server farm… taking “12 months of intensive graphics and 3-D animation rendering, amounting to up to 500,000 frames per week.” So that’s 26 million frames for a 95-minute long movie… I gotta look up how many animators it used to take to do those old animated Disney movies by hand (and how many frames they made).
