How KMM Created the World of Furiosa with Dell Technologies & NVIDIA

Bringing a dystopian world to life takes more than imagination-it takes smart planning and innovation. For George Miller, the creative force behind Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, reimagining a post-apocalyptic Australia meant combining bold creativity with advanced technology.

Kennedy Miller Mitchell (KMM), an Australian production house known for iconic films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Happy Feet, produced the film. Both KMM and George Miller faced the task of delivering the highest profit-and an artistic magnum opus-at the lowest cost possible. Filmmaking is a business, and as in any business, driving revenue growth, optimizing cost efficiency, and maximizing resources are key considerations.

Here's how KMM, with the help of Dell Technologies and NVIDIA, redefined filmmaking to push boundaries and empower creators, starting on the first day of filming.

Smarter Filmmaking with Previsualization

What Is Previsualization?

Pre-visualization-or, as it is often referred to in the industry, previs- is the process of planning scenes in a film before full-scale production begins. Back before AI - this process was both time-consuming and costly. In fact, many times films would enter production, the director would find that the scenes weren't working, and they'd have to go back to storyboards and start the process over.

Fortunately, with the use of AI-enabled software has made the previsualization-once a very lengthy and expensive process-much more efficient. With AI, filmmakers can create digital, 3D scenes to map out camera angles, movements, lighting, and action sequences.

Planning Efficiently with AI

The algorithms can even put the scenes into action, modeling the actors' movements within these environments, so the director can see everything up front and make necessary changes before the actual filming begins. Before filming started for Furiosa, KMM was able to previsualize the film with Dell Technologies and NVIDIA solutions.

"Thanks to the partnership with NVIDIA and Dell Technologies, we now have the ability to pre-visualize the film before we make the film," said Yan Chen, studio architect at KMM. "With Dell PowerScale, we can load entire scenes in thirty seconds or less, compared to the ten minutes it used to take," Chen said.

This significant reduction in latency empowered KMM's artists to focus in on their creative collaboration without the encumbrance of technical delays. This collaboration in turn enabled KMM to lay a foundation for the film's impressive visuals ahead of time.

"In Furiosa, there's a giant 15-minute chase sequence called Stow Away to Nowhere," said Chen. "With PowerScale, we were able to pre-visualize the entire sequence from beginning to end in a real-time system."

KMM stored the data on Dell PowerScale and then re-created the sequence for the real-life shoot. By previsualizing Furiosa with AI, KMM completed in eight months what would have traditionally required one to two years.

Managing Massive Data on Set

Handling High-Volume Data Workflows

In addition, filmmaking today requires huge amounts of data at every stage of production, from pre-production planning to post-production editing.

"New AI workloads in filmmaking require a tremendous amount of data," said Chen. "For instance, when we capture an actor's likeness on set, the actor walks into photo booth with about 64 AK DSLR cameras… capturing 8K videos at 60 frames a second."

That "tremendous" amount of data in Chen's example typically ranges between 20 to 30 terabytes per character per day-from Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa to Chris Hemsworth's dastardly Dr. Dementus.

"When you add all of that up, that scales up to tens of petabytes again. That needs to be stored on PowerScale, collated, processed and then shared with all the VFX studios all over the world," said Chen.

Reliable Data Management with PowerScale

Finally, KMM implemented PowerScale on premises to safeguard its assets and enable global collaboration.

"One key reason for our partnership with Dell Technologies is the ability of PowerScale to scale horizontally and vertically," Chen said. "As the backbone of our data storage and dissemination, it enables us to move information quickly and efficiently, even when dealing with large volumes of data."

As a result, KMM creative teams, partners and suppliers anywhere were able to create, store and share files amounting to tens of terabytes, seamlessly.

The Future of Filmmaking Is Here

In the film industry, as with any industry, driving revenue growth, optimizing cost efficiency, and maximizing resources are paramount. If you've seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, or Mad Max: Fury Road, you can imagine delivering all three was no easy feat. But through leveraging a modern IT strategy, KMM was able to deliver a jaw-dropping finished product in Furiosa under budget. And like the supercharged vehicles depicted in Furiosa, they were able to move quickly.

"Dell Precision workstations with NVIDIA RTX GPUs and Dell PowerScale let us use GenAI to realize directors' creative visions at a speed previously unknown in modern filmmaking," said Chen. "We're operating about 50 times faster than we did with more traditional methods."

Learn more about the Dell + KMM partnership here.

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