DreamWorks Animation: Celebrating the work to make dreams real

DreamWorks Animation has a deep passion and remarkable ambition to push the limits of artistry in their pursuit of sharing a good story. Across 30 years and nearly 50 feature films, DreamWorks has lived the promise so clearly visible in their company name. Doing the work to make dreams real.

DreamWorks has made a name for themselves, crafting unforgettable stories and beloved characters that endure in popular culture. NetApp is thrilled to have been there from the beginning, because the digital craft that DreamWorkers practice isn’t grounded just in imaginative plotlines and acting, nor just in dazzling direction and production values. No, it also comes down to the bits and bytes of data. And there's a lot of it.

So much data, in fact, that it continually transforms our shared understanding of the cinema arts, even as it perpetually reshapes our entertainment experiences. DreamWorks’ leadership in digital animation is the result of a disciplined approach to intelligent data infrastructure spanning decades, all to power creatives as they artfully blend the worlds of fantasy and reality.

Creating a movie studio from whole cloth is no easy feat. So, when three media luminaries set out to build a new live-action and animation studio in 1994, expectations for success were high.

And succeed is exactly what director Steven Spielberg, producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, and music mogul David Geffen did. As with all achievements, there were seminal moments that marked significant breakthroughs. This one is grounded in computer-generated animation, with waves of digital advances bringing increasingly fresh realism to the screen. But with every new technical platform and evolving layers of technology come greater volumes of data—and the need for an intelligent data strategy to succeed in an industry radically transformed by hardware and software where brushes and paint once ruled.

One particularly difficult puzzle with Shrek was animating animal fur and human hair with at-a-glance believability. Yet, where obstacles loom, innovations emerge. That's how buzzing wings on pixies and fairy godmothers came to blur and jitter. And how similar effects were deployed to make light behave realistically on surfaces like Shrek’s leather vest, Fiona’s golden tiara, and Farquaad’s satin cape. Each advance not only added another chapter to DreamWorks’ history but also marked milestones in animated cinema itself.

One frame at a time, the studio’s creatives and technologists discovered ways to digitize woven linen, felted wool, and plush velvet…milk, beer, mud, and lava...shaggy beards, gingerbread icing, trees stretching to the horizon, and a donkey’s fur. Now consider that some frames in Shrek are rendered and re-rendered upwards of 600 times, with each iteration saved and stored. Such a muddy swamp, so many leaves, and immense amounts of data.

Shrek was dedicated for preservation in the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress in 2020, where it resides alongside animated classics like Fantasia. The designation highlights its influence and relevance in advancing cinema as an art form.

Over two decades since Shrek’s release, the animation landscape continues to evolve. DreamWorks’ 2024 release, The Wild Robot, introduced a painterly, impressionistic style, marking a striking departure from the studio’s previous works and showcasing the philosophy of a “no single in-house style” approach to animation.

Shrek feature movie #5, set for release in 2026, will further demonstrate that DreamWorks’ films are an alchemy of narrative inspiration, passionate execution, and petabytes of data. It underscores that the world’s most important data lives on NetApp.

It’s a relationship that begins in 1994 with the NetApp Network File System, when hundreds of DreamWorks animators shared a mere 1TB of storage across multiple big screen projects. It continues today with, among other solutions:

• NetApp^® AFF A-Series all-flash storage providing blazing IOPS and throughput

• NetApp StorageGRID^® to secure, protect, and preserve 500 million files per feature film

• NetApp SnapMirror^® technology for effective data replication and increased data availability

• NetApp ONTAP^® software for single-pane-of-glass management of unified data storage

All with 99.9999% uptime, and security central to every transit of data. On this front, the team says, “Performance meets ambition.”

As DreamWorks’ need for unified data storage grows, NetApp steps up. Skottie Miller says, “NetApp was at the forefront of making it easy to just add capacity and performance independently. Our artists no longer had to think about how much storage was available. It was always there for them, and always reliable.”

DreamWorks’ ambition fueled an astonishing three decades of performance. Looking back on the studio’s artistic and technological achievements, two points are clear.

First, DreamWorks’ collective talents are matched only by their collective drive. To put it simply, DreamWorkers thrive at the vanguard of technology and art, which explains how a crew of hundreds working on just one feature animation film today can produce hundreds of millions of files, with versions of those files transiting from campus to campus, hemisphere to hemisphere. All to create digital worlds populated by unforgettable characters that seem inevitable to the rest of us, as if they had existed all along, simply waiting to be discovered rather than created.

Second, DreamWorks’ transformation is more than a journey. It’s a way of being. In which changes in company structure or technology or storytelling don’t fit neatly into tidy chapters. Instead, they overlap, edges blurring, with one era of technologists inspiring the next generation of artists, and those artists demanding more of the next generation of technologists. Which is how all great stories have unfolded, one chapter building on another, from time immemorial.

In a spirit of true collaboration, NetApp is pleased to congratulate DreamWorks on its first three decades of animated storytelling and cinematic inspiration.

Long ago and far away in 2001, a single pink dragon guarded Princess Fiona as Shrek faced countless perils to rescue her. Turns out a single dragon is just kids’ stuff. Fast forward to 2019, DreamWorks was acquired by NBCUniversal, but that digital artistry remains. In the third installment of DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon franchise, you discover 60,000 dragons taking to the sky. DreamWorkers call it, “Compute meets ambition.”

It's all part of a legacy only imagined in the minds of three founders who set out on their own quest for excellence so many years ago. A pursuit of doing the work to make dreams real—in today’s world of entertainment, and in future times and places yet to be imagined. One mere petabyte at a time.