MacGuff Studios Paris speeds up their creative process with Fiberway Networks

An animated film moves through hundreds of artists and technical stages before it reaches the screen. Models become characters, simulations become effects, and individual frames become finished sequences. Behind that creative work is a constant movement of large files between workstations, storage systems and rendering infrastructure.

For Illumination Studios Paris, formerly known as Illumination Mac Guff, the network is the connective tissue of that pipeline. Fiberway helps keep it fast, private and predictable so infrastructure does not interrupt the creative flow.

A studio pipeline built on shared infrastructure

Illumination Studios Paris is the Paris animation studio behind globally recognised productions from Illumination. Its official production-pipeline overview shows how many specialist departments contribute to every film, from modelling and rigging to animation, effects, lighting and compositing.

The same overview describes an IT environment spanning employee workstations, infrastructure servers, storage, network equipment and a render farm. Those systems do not operate independently. Artists need to open and update shared assets, production tools need consistent access to data, and the render farm needs to ingest scenes and return completed frames without creating a bottleneck.

When a project enters an intensive production phase, traffic grows with it. A network designed for ordinary office activity cannot simply be stretched to serve this workflow.

The challenge: move production data without moving the studio

Creative infrastructure rarely fits neatly in one room. Compute and storage can live across technical spaces or data centers while artists remain in the studio. The challenge is to make those separate environments behave like one local production network.

Sending sensitive production assets over the public internet adds unnecessary complexity. It can expose performance to variable routes and makes isolation harder to control. The alternative is a dedicated Layer 2 connection: a private extension of the studio network between locations.

FiberLayer turns separate sites into one environment

FiberLayer™ gives Illumination Studios Paris private Layer 2 connectivity across Fiberway’s backbone. Traffic stays off the public internet and travels between connected sites as part of a controlled network designed around the studio’s architecture.

That foundation supports the production pipeline in practical ways:

• Workstations and storage stay close in network terms, even when the underlying equipment is in different locations.
• Large assets move on dedicated capacity, without competing with public internet traffic.
• Render workloads remain predictable, helping compute resources receive source data and return frames consistently.
• Tagged VLANs isolate workloads, so production, storage, rendering and administrative traffic can follow separate policies.
• New capacity can be added at another connected site without redesigning the entire environment.

The value is not a single benchmark. It is the removal of friction from thousands of everyday actions across a long production schedule.

Speed for artists, control for the IT team

For an artist, infrastructure is at its best when it disappears. Scenes open when expected. Assets save without disrupting concentration. A render can be submitted without wondering which facility holds the compute behind it.

For the IT team, the same experience comes from control: defined circuits, predictable capacity, isolated network segments and a backbone that can reach the places where infrastructure needs to live. Fiberway combines those requirements in one managed interconnection layer.

This also creates options for resilience. Storage replication, stretched clusters and disaster-recovery systems can use the same private network foundation. As productions and datasets grow, the studio can scale compute or storage independently while keeping both inside a coherent topology.

The network as part of the creative process

Animation depends on iteration. A lighting adjustment, a simulation pass or a compositing change may travel through several teams and systems before approval. Shortening that loop gives artists more room to refine their work.

Fiberway does not create the images on screen. It creates the conditions in which the people and machines behind those images can work together smoothly. That is the power of a network designed around the workload: infrastructure becomes an accelerator for the creative process rather than a boundary around it.

Connect every part of your production environment

If your studio, post-production pipeline or render platform spans multiple technical locations, talk to a Fiberway engineer about connecting them through FiberLayer™.