Behind the scenes: Mad Max production outfit scales Dell for GenAI

Australian production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell (KMM) recently switched up its entire infrastructure stack to Dell Technologies from HPE. 

KMM, which has worked on action films such as Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, has forged a strong focus on real-time rendering and AI assisted workflows.

While AI may still be a “dirty word” in Hollywood, it’s helping KMM achieve certain production milestones with timing of certain tasks and achieving cost efficiency.

KMM CIO Yan Chen said the production company switched its entire infrastructure to Dell Technologies, including Precision workstations, monitors and PowerScale F200 storage arrays. 

“We do a lot of real time rendering and AI assisted workflows,” Chen explained. “At KMM we primarily do pre-visualisation and post-visualisation for [director] George Miller’s films. 

“For Furiosa, we did a lot of the previous push processes – when after you shoot the scene, you take the film plates and process them really quickly in reels. We use AI to rotoscope the image, composite and put all the temporary VFX elements into the scene as quickly as possible just to give George the ability to edit and cut the sequences.” 

Chen said this new workflow is a time and a money saver due to the ability to visualise scenes. 

“Real time is really good because it gives us the ability to put in all the special effects that are 3D-based, and this is also the first time we tried using AI,” Chen said. 

“We use AI in many ways, for compositing, but also to generate dialogue, sound and blend frames between each other and blend different takes. We’re also using generative AI for background mapping as temporary placeholders for real time visualisation. 

“AI is a bit of a dirty word in Hollywood and everyone’s a bit apprehensive. Mad Max producer Doug Mitchell and director George Miller are real pioneers when it comes to film making techniques and they’re very hungry to try new things, so for us, AI is definitely a boon and it’s doing wonders.”

Internally, KMM also grew from six in-house artists to about 25, adding further challenges to its previously infrastructure environment, but it’s not just its own staff that it caters to. It also manages movie vendors, which scale out to thousands of personnel, often exchanging petabytes of data. 

“We manage all of the data because we’re the central hub for all of the entire film,” Chen said. 

Chen said using Dell Technologies solutions, in particular PowerScale, provide it with 100GB connectivity to its back end and nearline storage capabilities, which means it can pull sequences together for Miller to review that day. 

“Previously, something like this would’ve taken days, but that’s now down to 30 minutes to an hour and the speed and scalability is pretty incredible,” he said. 

“The new storage system allows us to scale diagonally, which means if we need more space, we add a new node at the same time, meaning we’re also going to get more bandwidth because you get more throughput.

“We’re venturing deeper and deeper into AI. We are using AI to help conceptualise new projects and ideas, and eventually, we also want to start using AI to render final images, which is a brave new world for us.” 

Dell Technologies introduced its AI Factory packed with many new technologies and services during its annual conference in Las Vegas in May.

Built on services, ecosystem and infrastructure, the Dell AI Factory features the broadest AI solutions portfolio from the “desktop to data centre to cloud” along with key technology partnerships that will help create AI applications through a traditional purchase or as a Dell APEX subscription.

During the conference, Dell Technologies APJ president Peter Marrs revealed Dell’s generative AI business was booming in the region across all types of markets and industries including manufacturing, healthcare, government, retail, telcos and entertainment sectors.

“We’re also making investments in sales capacity and helping our customers make this transformation in each region and to work with partners as well,” Marrs said.

Dell Technologies Asia Pacific senior vice president and general manager of channel Tian Beng Ng also discussed how it was targeting a new breed of AI partners with its tier one relationships such as NVIDIA and Red Hat and through distribution.

“The ecosystem is important and we’re influencing them to be on the Dell stack where they’ll get access to our labs where they can test for example, the LLM on Dell,” Ng said.

Dell Technologies A/NZ managing director Angela Fox also said AI partners were a critical layer in the ecosystem and it was focused on combining their expertise to achieve scale and reach.

“In the world of AI, there will be multiple parties involved to deliver success,” Fox added.