Hasta La Motion!

Mighty Coconut recently completed production on Kings of Atlantis an animated action-adventure series for children ages 6-12, co-produced with Omnia Media for YouTube Red. In nine months, Mighty Coconut was tasked with creating 13, 11-minute episodes, totaling over two hours of animated content. During production, the studio was able to ramp up from a team of 20 to 60 artists, and create 150 character assets, 30 environments, over 400 props, and 2306 shots. Because of the volume of work and tight deadlines, the team needed a strong infrastructure for project management, tracking and review.

Founded in 2014, Austin-based creative shop Mighty Coconut produces original and branded content for clients across the film, television and games industries. The full-service studio specializes in animation, as well as providing its clients with visual effects, motion graphics and VR content for long- and short-form projects.

Rather than hiring a software team to design a pipeline from the ground up, Mighty Coconut enlisted Shotgun because of its robust Pipeline Toolkit and project management capabilities. “For the most part, we had a pipeline right out of the box, which was appealing since we had to scale up so quickly,” said Executive Producer and Series Director, Timothy Cunningham.

For production on Kings of Atlantis, the team worked primarily in Autodesk Maya and The Foundry’s Nuke. Both tools can be fully integrated with Shotgun, providing artists with a working environment within their creative tool. “Being able to give an artist a task and have them open it directly from the Shotgun loader without needing to worry about asset naming, publishing, version control (and so on) was a huge benefit that saved our team time and streamlined the workflow,” noted Lucas Martell, Co-Founder. The Shotgun loader also enabled artists to quickly find their tasks and navigate to the latest versions without needing to search through various folders to find the most up-to-date shots or assets.

Mighty Coconut communicated internally and with their co-production partner Omnia Media in Los Angeles using Shotgun’s review tools, including playlist sharing, client sharing and annotated notes. “Being able to streamline the review process and have everything in a centralized location is of huge value.”

“We wouldn’t have been able to complete a project of this magnitude without the help of a robust pipeline facilitated with Shotgun. We’re continuing to develop our pipeline with new custom tools that integrate into Shotgun, and I feel confident that our infrastructure is fully equipped to handle future features and large-scale projects,” Cunningham concluded.

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