Safe hands: Blink eyes up the future with trust in Escape

In the high-pressure, deadline-driven world of media and entertainment, relationships and trust can matter more than headline specifications and marketing spin.

When London-based production group Blink was faced with an animation project that suddenly scaled up in scope and 3D demand, it turned to Escape Technology to deliver a fast and extensive technical upgrade without disrupting ongoing work.

“We were seeing real performance issues impacting the infrastructure. We had to address that, and we had to do it while the show was live,” says Blink’s Head of Technology Christos Georgallides. “With Escape’s help, we were able to procure, install, and migrate everything while the production was running. The artists didn’t realise we’d switched storage; they just noticed that suddenly things were good.”

The choice of Escape wasn’t an accident; both Blink and Georgallides go back years.

Friends of long standing

Blink is a multi-award-winning group of connected production companies spanning advertising, animation, long-form content, games and music services. Blinkink is a world-class short-form animation studio; Blink Industries focuses on longer form mixed-media work, including stop motion, claymation and puppetry. The group has also expanded into game design and music supervision.

When Georgallides arrived five years ago from legendary boutique VFX facility Glassworks, Blink Industries had moved into a new building in Holloway. As the new site needed infrastructure built from scratch, Blink had already turned to long-standing technical partner Escape.

“I had always known about Escape. I’d worked in various VFX companies in Soho, and Escape had always been my primary vendor to deal with, because of their knowledge and support,” says Georgallides. “I was pleasantly surprised when I came here and was able to continue that relationship with Escape’s Oliver Knapp.”

At the Holloway site, Escape played a central role in getting the studio up and running. “It was just primary storage back then. But there was no backup in place, and there was no other supporting hardware in place for services like VM infrastructure,” Georgallides explains. “Escape helped flesh out the infrastructure, supplying all the SI, the servers, the domain controllers, and the workstations.”

What started as a small team quickly expanded, with some productions growing to around 200 people. As demands increased, Blink relied on Escape to source and specify the additional systems and kit required.  

“Even though we're largely 2D, there were 3D elements in certain projects,” Georgallides adds. “We needed a render farm for some of that work.”

This didn’t just mean adding rendering capacity but also the supporting systems behind it, including servers and databases. “We leaned heavily on Escape to procure that kit,” Georgallides says.

Escape considered Blink’s production-specific workflows and mixed pipelines, rather than offering generic hardware bundles.

“Escape understands the disk speeds for certain workloads,” Georgallides says. “They know that compositors need different storage devices for primary and their cache. If you went to a standard vendor, a big hardware provider, they wouldn’t understand a compositor’s workflow. Escape understands our industry well; they understand the tools, and they spec the machine accordingly, and it’s exactly what we need.”

According to Georgallides, such industry knowledge helped Blink avoid common pitfalls around hardware choices, ensuring machines were correctly specified, “right down to the clock speed required for CPUs to be certified on kit or with production software”.  

Since then, Escape has effectively acted as Blink’s primary technical partner for infrastructure design, procurement, and support.  

Targeted response

That relationship paid dividends when Blink was in the middle of a two-year animation project. Pipeline issues, scene problems and pressure on primary storage mounted as the project scaled up. “Halfway through it, the scope grew. There were more 3D elements introduced to it,” Georgallides says. “At those sorts of volumes, not only were there strains on the primary servers, but we also had performance issues.”

“I reached out to Escape to find solutions,” he says. “After discussing price and performance, we were able to quickly procure a server and get it in, installed and migrated, without any disruption to the wider production.”

On Escape’s recommendation, Blink went with high-performance NVMe storage. “We know we can go into lots of different workflows now, and the performance of the primary storage won’t be an issue,” says Georgallides.  

It was a major investment, but Georgallides is firm about the benefits. “It's future-proofed – even looking three to five years ahead, we’re sure that it's sized correctly for us. The solution we got also allows us to burst into the cloud if we need to, and to orchestrate that data as well. That's all down, again, to making sure that we've got the right solution.”

With NVMe and RAM prices having risen sharply since then, he says the timing was well judged too.

The project also involved upgrading parts of the network from 10Gb to 100Gb, seamlessly, again without the wider production team being aware. At the end of the project, Georgallides says he even had people asking, ‘Did you ever get that server?’

A workstation refresh followed a similar pattern. Blink's animation pipeline doesn't demand the same horsepower as a full VFX studio, but 3D elements in a long-form project demanded a step up in processing power. Escape identified Lenovo's Ryzen Threadripper-based workstations as the right fit, with the core count and clock speed Georgallides needed for the work. “They’ve been really rock solid,” he notes.

“I know how a sales pitch goes, but I never felt that in this case,” he adds. “Escape understands our industry well, and they understand the tools. They spec the machine accordingly, and it’s exactly what we need.”

Major overhauls aren’t the only area where Escape has stepped in. When Blink wished to migrate away from VMware hypervisor software, Georgallides needed a dedicated server to test and evaluate alternatives. Escape's Oliver Knapp sourced a well-specified Dell machine that gave him exactly that.

“That was a real back and forth, with Olly doing that on my behalf, bouncing between vendors and getting me that good price,” says Georgallides. “I’ve now got a great test bed for projects.”

Ask the experts

Support means more than just technical calls in an emergency. When a network OS vendor overhauled its command language, Escape sent an engineer into Blink to provide on-site training. “Not because there was something wrong, but just to bring the team up to speed,” Georgallides says. “You wouldn’t get that anywhere else.”

“The great thing is that they’re a phone call away,” he continues. “You can sound out ideas with them. You can go straight through to Olly, who has a wealth of knowledge. They’ll suggest solutions or put you in contact with people who can respond, like CTO Lee Danskin.”

For thornier workflow questions, there’s support engineer Tim Harcourt. “If Olly or Lee don't know, they'll just say, give Tim a call,” says Georgallides. “That's how accessible they are.”

Georgallides’ focus has shifted from fixing problems to planning, including conversations about cloud.

“Because we’re predominantly on-prem, we use cloud more for disaster recovery, but we have been speaking with the Escape team, who have been facilitating conversations with cloud vendors about the potential of how we can move to or burst into cloud.”  

The ambition is big at Blink, says Georgallides. “There are going to be lots more projects. We need that ability to scale. And Escape will be there in the conversation.”