Case Study: Important Looking Pirates achieves scalable, low-latency cloud rendering to deliver high-quality VFX on time and within budget with Amazon Web Services

Important Looking Pirates - Customer Case Study

Important Looking Pirates (ILP) is a Stockholm-based VFX studio founded in 2007 that has grown to about 50 staff producing visual effects for TV, film, commercials, VR, web, and games for international clients. The studio’s biggest technical challenge was rendering: an in‑house 100-node render farm struggled with large, spiky workloads (single frames can be ~2 GB and monthly jobs can exceed 20,000), and prior cloud use was limited by transfer-speed bottlenecks, making it hard to scale without costly permanent hardware.

ILP deployed Avere vFXT Edge filers on AWS alongside Amazon EC2 Spot Instances within a VPC so scene data is automatically moved to the cloud with low latency and artists use the same workflow for local or cloud renders. The result: rapid, cost-effective scaling (Spot Instances can cut costs up to ~90%), the ability to double render capacity for peak periods, on-time delivery of simultaneous high-profile shows, and a flexible model that ties compute costs to projects instead of permanent investment.

Important Looking Pirates

Niklas Jacobson

Visual Effects Supervisor