Blue-Zoo
Productions is an award-winning animation house founded in 2000 by
entrepreneurs Adam Shaw, Tom Box and Oli Hyatt. This creative, adventurous and
independent company has a renowned reputation for their passionate, stand-out,
high-quality animation for TV, commercials, children’s programming, Titles and
Idents.
Over the past 10 years Blue-Zoo have built strong relationships with TV Broadcasters and Media companies allowing them to produce fantastic hits such as “Those
Scurvy Rascals,” ‘Kerwhizz” for C-Beebies and “Stitch-Up Showdown,” which is
shown on Nickelodeon worldwide.
Animation-house, Blue-Zoo had a requirement for 32TB of high performance shared storage to
support new projects including Nick Jr’s Olive the Ostrich and C-Beebies’ new
multi-platform animation Tree Fu Tom.
This requirement came about as the award-winning animation house moved to new studios in London and in response to the increased storage demands of stereo 3D content.
GB Lab’s high-performance central storage
system, Space, was installed through GB Labs’ dealer partner, Encompass,
following a demonstration at Broadcast Video Expo (BVE). The system is being
used by Blue-Zoo to manage after-effects and renderings. Tom Box, founder at
Blue-Zoo commented: “The decision to go with GB Labs was easy. After we met
them at BVE, GB Labs set up the system at the studio, allowing us to test the
compatibility of Space with our systems before we made any decision. We’d
evaluated other storage solutions but they seemed overly complicated and tied
us into proprietary software. For us more software just means more problems.”
He added: “What was particularly attractive was
how plug and play it all was. Space was really easy to install and seamlessly
integrated into our network and workstations like Maya without downtime. The
speed, cost and sheer ease of the system meant it was a no brainer for us.”
Ben Pearce, director at GB Labs said: “We’re naturally delighted to be working with a great name like Blue-Zoo. We know that businesses are having to cope with the
additional costs of storage because of HD and 3D content, so our systems are designed
to be affordable, open and scaleable – which means your storage grows as you
grow. Good storage systems should be installed and forgotten about – they shouldn’t
be anything other than easy to use, set up and support.”
