NVIDIA GPUs take part in Richmanclub Studios upcoming Mecha Movie 'The Boy and His Robot'

Founded by Rich Ho in Singapore in 2004, Richmanclub Studios is a motion picture production company. Its first official production was the short film, “The Alien Invasion” in 2004, which has been shown around the world. The film was the first Singaporean film to be nominated for the “Chinese Oscar”, The Golden Horse Awards 2004 for Best International Digital Short Film.

The studio has also won the Special Technical Achievement Award (Hive Film Festival), Audience Favorite (Substation First Take) and the Asia-Pacific wide Gold Award-Digital Art (ACMSIGGRAPH ComGraph).

In 2011, Richmanclub Studios launched two additional departments – Richopus Music to offer music production services and IVIVFX to provide post-production services.

CHALLENGE
“In the past, smaller independent studios like mine, had to struggle with having our vision hampered by the cost and time restrictions from traditional technology in movie making. Compromise in quality always seems to be spoken about, and much time is spent on making things work rather than focusing on the artistry of creation and storytelling. We were looking for something that would enable us to work faster and improve the production flow,” said Ho.

For its upcoming movie “The Boy and His Robot”, the studio began looking at technologies to expedite and improve its film-making processes. Its objectives were to use technology to support artistry and achieve high quality results with low cost and time.

Ho noticed that his brother-in-law was playing games using NVIDIA GPUs and was impressed by the visual quality. As a keen follower and technologically driven director, Ho was fascinated by the power of GPU computing and its application in the film-making industry.

“What NVIDIA has done for gaming should be good for film-making. As a movie producer/director, who often creates story-driven films heavy in visual effects, I am very excited about the possibilities created by NVIDIA’s groundbreaking advancements in the GPU,” believed Ho.

He was also impressed with how CUDA was able to accelerate applications and plans to leverage CUDA for rendering in production and real-time editing.

SOLUTION
Together with NVIDIA, Multi-plAtform Game Innovation Centre (MAGIC) at Nanyang Technological University, Sony, and OTOY’s OctaneRender, Richmanclub Studios seek to produce and showcase the world’s first live-action short movie, with visual effects that are almost entirely rendered by GPUs , and journey towards employing a new post production workflow and technology that may just change the traditional landscape of movie making.

Richman Studios and its partners are using a range of NVIDIA Tesla and Quadro GPUs for the production of “The Boy and His Robot”.

IMPACT
According to Ho, industry tests of rendering have shown that GPU performs 68 times faster than CPU. To achieve the same results, GPU cost is just 7.6 percent of CPU cost.

It also took one hour to render a room on a CPU. Using the GPU, the process took just 10 minutes.

“These results prove that with GPU technology, things can be accelerated for film production. NVIDIA enables films to be visualized and creates photorealistic qualities for the screen,” said Ho.

“The Boy and His Robot” is targeted to be distributed over the internet and film festival circuit at the end of this year.

“This deadline would be impossible using CPUs but it can be done using NVIDIA GPUs,” said Ho.

Image Source: The Boy and His Robot