5 Minutes with Kevin VFX

Kevin is a boutique VFX shop founded in 2017 by Sue Troyan, Tim Davies and Darcy Parsons specializing in high-end VFX and finishing for commercials and producing compelling imagery for any medium.

Named VFX Company of 2025 by creative arts publication SHOTS, Kevin VFX’s recent projects include working for Squarespace (Barry and Mosley), Life360 (Coffin) and YouTube TV (What A Time to Be a Live Sports Fan). The privately owned and operated company is based in LA on the Santa Monica border and employs around 30 staff, with the capacity to more than double as projects demand.

As Head of Engineering for Kevin since 2019, Graeme Back has overseen a change in infrastructure to accommodate growth and resiliency including a migration of rendering from on-prem to the cloud enabled by Sohonet.

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Graeme, please give a little background on the decision to migrate core technology off-prem?

Kevin VFX started out based in Venice, CA in a small building with high rent and not enough power. During Covid it made sense to move to a new property in a cheaper location with double the available power.

As part of that move we added Sohonet Multiport as our primary internet connection. We started off with a 3Gb to get us up and running and as the company grew, we were able to add some staff and take on slightly bigger jobs and the flexibility of Multiport allowed us to expand to 5Gb. That allowed us to set up a 2Gb direct connect into Google which became the main point of entry for our remote artists. It also gave us a more direct connection to their virtual machines to start rendering in the cloud. We saw instant benefit to that. 

As our business grew, we added more equipment and more staff but soon ran out of power in the new building too. Power, it seems, is the Achilles heel of physical location. Whilst GPUs offer better performance, the downside of running them for rendering is that they use a colossal amount of power. At that point we saw an opportunity to relocate our equipment into a data center. This would give us access to more power so we can add more render nodes as well as giving us a better resilience to power outages in the local area.

‍Why choose Sohonet?

I've been familiar with Sohonet for over 20 years since my time working at The Mill in London in the late 90s. At that time The Mill was one of a number of Soho (London) post houses that came together to create the original Sohonet fast fiber connectivity.

As I moved jobs and gained more responsibility for making key technology decisions it was a no-brainer to use the company that I was familiar with. When I arrived at Kevin VFX and the decision-making buck stopped with me it was an even easier decision to take because I didn't have anyone to sell the idea to internally.

Sohonet has more resiliency than other solutions because it has more indirect backups to failure going into that data center. In the long term it allows us to be independent of our physical building. If we ever decide to relocate, in theory it's a case of just making sure we've provisioned a Sohonet connection in that new building and then we just move over our endpoint PC over IP equipment and we're connected back to our data center.

The migration was made simpler because Sohonet was able to route graphics at both locations through Google Cloud Platform. Our artists connect to HP Anywhere Teradici through an access point in GCP and then Sohonet routed the traffic to the workstation wherever it is. This means our remote artists only need to know about one connection point - it doesn't matter where their systems are. Sohonet enables the network routing to automatically connect to their workstation whether it’s on-prem or the data center. Instead of having to shut the office down and move everything in one go, we were able to move a machine at a time, and once moved and the powered back up, the artist didn't have to think about anything. They were just connecting back to their machine and unbeknownst to them the physical location of their hardware changed.

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Your suite of Sohonet products also includes ClearView Flex and FileRunner. How do those fit into your services?

We offer color in house and work closely with other color shops as required. When we do these remote sessions for clients, the streaming between colorist and client is enabled by Clearview Flex for remote clients. We are seeing an uptake in clients actually coming into the building but also work with many advertising agencies outside of the LA region who don't come in. So ClearView comes into its own in sessions with those clients.

We use FileRunner internally when our shoot supervisors are on shoots. It allows them to transfer all stills and reference files to us quickly so we can ingest them into our pipeline. That might be done by them connecting back to the office over the Internet via Teradici or it might be done by a support person in the office physically. Then we deliver assets to clients. This tends to be their final copies of jobs that they're keeping. We send this over FileRunner for them to download and keep it on their own servers.

We like FileRunner because unlike other apps it doesn't require a plugin. In the past our clients have experienced problems when having to install apps [of competitor services] but implementing FileRunner is so smooth. There’s no plugin, it runs super efficiently. It’s just easier for our clients and easier for us.

‍Where do you stand in the great AI debate about whether it is a tool or a threat?

We're researching AI, learning the tools and seeing what's available. Traditionally we do a lot of pitch work for agencies to land jobs but for all the work that we put in making animatics and storyboards we see little benefit from that when we don't win the job. Potentially we could use AI to speed up the brainstorming and pitch iteration process. Also, if a client came to us with a clearer representation of what they wanted having used AI to help them visualize it then that could be beneficial too.

The twin track of thought is that I work in a company full of creative people so removing one of the principal early stages of the creative process could be a risk. So, I can see AI working both ways.

I don't think we're at the point where AI images are generally accepted as high quality, certainly not for a primetime TVC. We’re in that super noisy phase of the introduction of a new tech where developers are trying to sell it into the industry, but I think ultimately the public will decide. They will be the ultimate arbiters of taste. As it stands today, it will change the way we work but I am skeptical that fully AI generated visuals will wash away the creative craft at the heart of our business.