Revolutionizing Visualization and Animation with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on AWS

The visual effects (VFX) industry has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, constantly evolving to meet the growing demands of the film and gaming industries that continually improve the complexity of their visual compositions. Artists and designers often rely on high-end GPUs and specialized software, but in recent years, scaling high-performance workstations has become increasingly difficult. 

Infrastructure Challenges in an Evolving Industry

Limited supply and rocketing demand for use cases such as AI training, have made GPUs and high performance computing hardware difficult and exceedingly expensive to procure and have placed immense strain on studios that rely on cutting-edge processing power. Traditional on-premise infrastructure also requires careful power planning, cooling, and physical space, all of which further complicate the ability to scale resources quickly for new projects. As the industry moves toward faster production cycles and distributed teams, the need for a flexible, cloud-based approach has never been greater.

Halon Entertainment: Visual Storytelling at Scale

Halon Entertainment, a leading visualization and animation studio based in Glendale, California, has played a pivotal role in shaping modern storytelling, contributing to blockbuster movies, TV shows and games like The Mandalorian, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Fortnite. Halon was acquired by NEP four years ago, expanding its capabilities as part of a larger media technology group. Their work demands advanced rendering capabilities, and seamless collaboration across artists, supervisors, and directors worldwide. 

Historically, Halon operated out of a small Santa Monica office that posed infrastructure challenges. The facility struggled with heat management, power failures, and limited network bandwidth, all of which made supporting their fleet of on-premise Windows workstations increasingly difficult. Artists relied on VPN access to physical machines over a shared 1-gigabit connection, which frequently resulted in bottlenecks, slow rendering, and connection timeouts. IT staff had to manually manage these connections, further increasing operational strain. With the studio’s expanding global footprint, provisioning new workstations quickly for projects in the United Kingdom, North America, and beyond became paramount.

The Shift to Virtual Workstations

Partnering with Caylent, Halon transitioned to a custom AWS virtual desktop infrastructure that has significantly improved Halon’s efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Previously, onboarding a new artist took days due to hardware procurement and setup delays and resourcing projects could take weeks of lead time. Now, workstations are provisioned in minutes, accelerating project ramp-up times. Render speeds have doubled, accelerating production timelines, while automated scaling ensures resources are only active when needed, cutting unnecessary costs. Halon now benefits from a pay-as-you-go approach, optimizing spending based on actual usage.

Collaboration has also improved with multi-user access and shared storage, enabling artists, supervisors, and IT administrators to work on the same instance simultaneously. Shared storage also ensures seamless file access across team members. IT operations have streamlined significantly—manual machine reboots are no longer needed, and cross-region deployments provide redundancy that prevents downtime. Additionally, security has been strengthened with Okta integration and TPN compliance, ensuring studio-grade access controls and data protection.

A Future-Ready Studio, Powered on AWS

By transitioning to a cloud-based workstation model, Halon has eliminated infrastructure bottlenecks, improved artist efficiency, and gained the flexibility to scale globally. The impact extends beyond just IT—it has changed how projects are staffed, how work is delivered, and how Halon competes in the fast-moving VFX industry.

With 50+ users already onboarded, Halon is targeting a full migration by April. The solution also positions Halon to expand global operations seamlessly. The ability to spin up high-performance workstations on demand gives the studio an unprecedented level of agility, allowing them to take on larger, more complex projects without hardware limitations.