The Future of Production Amplified: Moving Middle Earth to the Cloud with “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”

As part of our series, “The Future of Production Amplified,” NAB Amplify content partner Jennifer Wolfe chats with producer Ron Ames about the fully cloud-based workflow for the first season of Amazon Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Ames is an industry veteran with post-production credits going back to 2003, when he was enlisted by VFX supervisor Rob Legato to assistant direct and produce the visual effects for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. Since then, he has worked as a VFX producer, post-production supervisor, and first assistant director of special units on more than 20 productions including Avatar, The Departed, Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond, and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

In his current role as producer on The Rings of Power, Ames oversees all the technical departments from camera capture to exhibition. The Lord of the Rings franchise is known for its award-winning visuals that have pushed the art and science of visual effects, which meant that the stakes were high for the first season of the first episodic to emerge from Middle Earth. From the very beginning, the production team understood they would need an end-to-end cloud-based workflow to complete the first season, which contained a whopping 9,164 VFX shots shared among 12 global vendors and 1,500+ artists located all around the world.

“I think we are the first production to be fully cloud-based intentionally from the beginning,” Ames says, detailing the workflow and the impact it had on the creatives and extended crew. “As we discovered what that meant, it actually became an even a larger part of our show.”

For Ames, the surprising thing about a fully cloud-based workflow was that it meant that assets were available to anyone at any time, all within a secure network. “We hadn’t thought of that when we started,” he recounts. “That wasn’t something that we set out to do, but we found that it was useful and it became standard. All of these modern technologies are brand new and then, once they’re used, it becomes a standard. So the directors just expected it. All the artists on the show, the showrunners, everyone knew that anything was available at any time, wherever we were, as long as we had Internet. And that’s becoming the new standard.”

In Part 1 of this exclusive Q&A, Ames provides an overview of the cloud-based workflow developed for The Rings of Power, describing how assets were housed in AWS S3 buckets for multiple vendors to access at any given time. He also discusses how it would have been impossible for the series to have been made any other way, and how the ease and efficiencies cloud-based workflows provide are quickly becoming the new standard in film and television production.

Watch Part 1 below:

In Part 2, Ames dives into the details of producing The Rings of Power, naming the key players who helped make the project a reality, including AWS and VFX vendors ILM, Rodeo FX and Rising Sun Pictures, among others. He also details the collaboration between Blackmagic Design and Company 3, who teamed up to develop a cloud-based color correction and finishing pipeline that allowed colorist Skip Kimball to color grade episodes remotely with real-time review and feedback.

Watch Part 2 below:

In Part 3, Ames shares some of the biggest lessons learned from producing the first season of The Rings of Power, including the idea that not having materials on-prem was actually quite freeing. He also discusses how cloud-based workflows are changing production and post as a whole, and that the cloud’s main asset is scalability, making it available to productions of all sizes. “All the shows I’m working on now currently have some aspect of cloud-based production,” he says. “It is becoming ubiquitous.”

Watch Part 3 below:

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