In our June webinar, we took a trip down memory lane to look back over our 15-year long relationship with leading UK-based post-production company, Gorilla. Joining Perifery’s Senior Sales Director, Peter Watling, was Gorilla’s Managing Director, Richard Moss, and Director of Technology and Operations, Rhodri James. In this blog, we recap the session to give you an overview of Gorilla’s evolving storage requirements, their vision for the future of the industry, and insights into their views on AI and cloud technology.
A journey through time
Richard provided the audience with a brief history of Gorilla, which is celebrating its 25th year in 2024. The company began in Cardiff in 2009 with one linear tape suite and has grown organically from a small boutique to now, having three sites across Cardiff and Bristol and managing between 100 and 200 Avid seats. Rich highlighted the hybrid setup of Gorilla, with multiple offline but connected rooms to facilitate remote and in-facility working.
Rhodri went on to explain the company’s versatility, handling a range of projects from live sports events to high-end dramas, prime time TV shows to productions for the likes of Netflix and Apple.
Turning the conversation to the relationship between Gorilla and Perifery, Pete asked the pair to explain how and why it all started. Rich explained that it was around the transition from tape to file-based workflows, when storage was quite complicated. At that time, clients would arrive with hard drives which would sit on a single tier of storage. The vast amount of data required a more efficient and reliable method of storage and management. This need for a robust storage solution led Gorilla to Perifery’s media-focused nearline solution, Object Matrix. The solution not only simplified operations but also provided a secure and scalable way to manage the growing volume of media files.
The impact of Object Matrix
Rhodri highlighted the transformative impact that the Object Matrix technology has had on Gorilla’s workflows. He noted that the post-production company needed a solution with high integrity which could also understand what was being ingested into it. Object Matrix provided clustered storage at an economical price and high levels of redundancy. Rhodri pointed out that the features of Object Matrix were very advanced at the time. While the initial requirement was for a robust solution, Gorilla also benefited from additional media-aware tools that weren’t widely available at the time. He highlighted the inclusion of metadata and the benefit of finding what was needed, when it was needed.
Referring to Gorilla’s clients, Rhodri said, “it's not our data, it's their data, and being able to tell them that we had a solution that had complete integrity was key to us.” Having confidence in their storage solution was paramount. It was noted that Gorilla is very much an on-prem company, now running two large clusters with automatic, real-time replication. This facilitates disaster recovery, meaning if one site goes down, the data is still available from another. The company also uses some cloud services where appropriate.
Future of possibilities
As the conversation shifted to future technologies, Rich and Rhodri discussed the role of AI in the post-production sector. Rich highlighted AI's potential to enhance creative workflows and automate tasks, although there was doubt that it would completely change the business. Rhodri agreed that AI was a tool to get things done but was not a replacement for creative individuals.
Pete then asked the pair what they expect from technology partners, to which they emphasized communication and understanding of workflow needs. Highlighting the importance of open communication, Rich said, “Some of the technology that we use, the only negative side is, you can never talk to them.” Echoing these sentiments, Rhodri added, “If a technology vendor can’t communicate, doesn’t have the right distribution, they might have great technology but can’t communicate with that, then I will not get involved with them."
Pete concluded the webinar by congratulating Gorilla on their 25th anniversary as well as celebrating the 15-year partnership. As Gorilla looks ahead, they remain optimistic and ready to embrace new opportunities and challenges in the post-production landscape - with Perifery by their side.
To learn more about how Perifery is supporting the media industry to overhaul their workflows, explore our case studies. If you missed the live webinar, you can watch on-demand now.
