New Zealand-based Weta Digital is going “all-in” on AWS to create a new, cloud-based visual effects (VFX) workflow. The two companies have signed a multi-year deal as part of which the studio will migrate the vast majority of its IT infrastructure to AWS.

In the past 25 years, Weta Digital has brought to life some of the most memorable worlds and characters in film. These include Middle-earth and Gollum in New Line’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Na’vi and beautiful landscapes of Pandora in Avatar.

In addition, Weta Digital will use AWS to produce and render original content from the newly announced ‘Weta Animated’ and deliver on its multi-year movie slate.

The workflow includes a set of technologies for VFX artists that will underpin the studio’s global expansion, accelerate key portions of film production, and expand Weta Digital’s New Zealand operations. The idea is to enable its team of artists to collaborate on visual effects remotely.

Weta Digital’s pipeline includes 100 proprietary tools and the LED-stage virtual production service.

With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Weta Digital will have expanded access to a broad range of specialized Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instances for better integration of ML into the VFX creation process.