The biggest user in Britain is Telemagination, where 9 machines are used on the studio's own productions and are also offered as a facility service to other producers. Current users include Honeycombe Animation, Snowden Fine and Bermuda Shorts--which is producing Channel 4's new 13 part series of Candy Guard's Pond Life on the studio's Animos.

DreamWorks' head of technology, Dylan Kohler, explained how Animo is being integrated into the company's new digital studio, alongside production of its first animated feature film, Prince of Egypt. He joined DreamWorks after working on the original CAPS project at Disney and then helping Warner Bros. set up its digital production facilities.

"DreamWorks was founded one-and-half years ago by Stephen Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It is the first Hollywood studio to be founded in decades so it presented a unique opportunity to set up something different," says Kohler.

"Part of the freedom came from having no legacy, no resources that we had to draw on, being able to rethink everything. At my first meeting with Jeffrey and Stephen they were talking about making films in New York and cutting in L.A. That is still pretty cutting edge stuff. At DreamWorks we are trying to build what the hype tells you is the digital studio of the 21st century. In fact, that is pretty much true."

"Most of the initial effort is going into feature animation simply because this is one of the most analyzed and compartmentalized aspects of film making. For 50 years people have been working on how to make the whole system work better using traditional technology. That makes it all the easier to make the transition to the digital world.

Nick Park of Aardman Animations at Cardiff.Courtesy of Ron Diamond

"We dedicated ourselves to deciding what was necessary for the filmmakers rather than just developing the tools themselves. There is always a danger of getting carried away and building tools that do little things. You need to concentrate on creativity," he says.

"So we allied ourselves with partners we would need to develop the components. We partnered early on with Silicon Studio and set out to define what the studio would require. We also partnered with IBM and Cambridge for the elements. Also Avid and Alias/Wavefront.

"The network should be able to support all sorts of systems. We are starting with feature animation but some of the key components will have to be of use in the other divisions. One of the fundamentals is the asset management system. This is a huge database covering every digital piece that goes into your film-- a sound file, a cel, a palette. That means we will be able to go back to Prince of Egypt as a historical record. We could even go back and use the elements of it in things like an interactive game. "We are working with Animo in development. Animo shares the distributed workstation approach that we have. Each workstation can run the same software--both Intel machines and Silicon Graphics. What that means to us is that we can have workstations on their own but also drafted in to work together.

"For a larger studio like us, we want to have things on different platforms. Very often certain software is available on just one platform or another so it is nice to have a mix of systems. I think that the world is changing and that it is best to focus on software first and foremost and hardware as you choose.

"Cambridge has also done a grand job in respect to the studio's desire for openness. We are also interested in using its vector package but we think this will have a lot more use in effects animation. At the moment we are concentrating a lot more on the front end of the process." One of the most significant developments for this year's Festival was the presence of such a large number of visitors from American studios. Warner Bros and Disney were both there in force in order to feed their new studios in London and Paris respectively.