Recent NZ film successes such as Whale Rider and the Lord of the Rings trilogy have focused the attention of many in the film production world on New Zealand. But although our worldbeating scenery and ‘can do’ kiwi culture are an attractive lure for offshore production companies, their expectations of our technology infrastructure are such that anything less than state of the art is not acceptable. For Silverscreen and their post production arm Oktobor, an up-to-the-minute communications infrastructure flexible enough to quickly accommodate any scenario is ‘must have’ technology in today’s hi-end commercial and film production world.

Silverscreen Productions is one of Australasia’s most reputable film production companies with over 30 years’ experience making high-end commercials. With offices in Sydney, Auckland and Wellington, Silverscreen is working with agencies and clients throughout the world, as well as Asia and Pacific Rim. The company has won an impressive number of industry awards including AXIS Production Company of the Year, and multiple ATV awards. Silverscreen offers full film production services including post-production, visual effects and animation, through its Effects and Post division, Oktobor. Oktobor’s portfolio includes producing visual effects commercials for a number of major brands in New Zealand, Australia and Asia such as Sony, Toyota, Cadbury and Foster’s. Oktobor developed one of the first interactive television applications for Sky NZ, and is involved in a number of web projects.

The challenge

Silverscreen and Oktobor moved into new purpose-built facilities in Wellington in October 2000.

The building was designed as a high-tech hub focused on international effects, animation, post-production and interactive work. Silverscreen required a multi-service telephony and data system for its Auckland, Wellington and Sydney premises. The chosen supplier was required to deliver voice and data, for both LAN and WAN connections to the offices, in a flexible, yet cost-effective manner.

The solution

IBM provided Silverscreen with one of the first IP Telephony (or converged networks) running Voice over IP (VoIP) within New Zealand. The solution was based on Cisco AVVID technology and included Cisco Call Manager, Cisco Switches and Cisco 3640 routers. The first phase in Wellington was completed in 2000, with Auckland and Sydney following in 2001 and 2002. Today, Silverscreen has been operating a full trans-Tasman VoIP solution for about a year.

So what does the company think about their converged infrastructure? We asked Silverscreen IT and telecommunications manager Fraser Simpson to comment.

iStart: Firstly, why VoIP?
Fraser Simpson: For us, there was no other solution that fitted into our cutting edge profile and requirements and we could see the future potential for VoIP. Future proofing network infrastructures is the Holy Grail for IT managers, and we think we’ve come pretty close to ensuring longevity of our core telecommunications infrastructure by using the AVVID architecture.

iStart: What was the financial appeal?
Simpson: We saw the huge cost-saving potential on telephone bills between national offices in Wellington and Auckland. And the significant savings to be had between the NZ and Sydney offices was something we couldn’t ignore either. We knew the simplification of our data and voice infrastructure would lead to an overall reduction in implementation costs because we were able to standardise our equipment. Furthermore, this system has enabled us to consolidate support staff in a central location – and have less of them.

iStart: How does this system compare to other PBX systems in your experience?
Simpson: Expandability and scalability are terms we use on a daily basis as we contend with adding capacity to a growing company. In a traditional PBX system we would have been undertaking major annual revisions of our infrastructure to accommodate growth. Now we simply add phones as required. VoIP has enabled much of the support to be done on software-based equipment and this has meant we’ve been able to manage the system from remote locations at home, from a hotel room and even on a number of occasions from our vehicles using both GPRS (Vodafone) and CDMA (Telecom) mobile networks. This flexibility has obvious time-saving implications and we’ve experienced, firsthand, the reality of the adage that time saved is equal to money saved.

iStart: Specifically, what are the business benefits the converged voice and data infrastructure bring to Silverscreen?
Simpson: There are several:

• The inter-office call charges across the Tasman and between the two NZ of fices are non-existent. We also save significantly when dialling (non Silverscreen) numbers within those cities, as the Call Manager routes the calls to the local gateway. This effectively means that any call to a Sydney business from the Wellington office is billed as a local Sydney call.
• Building a TVC and film backbone necessitates a superior enterprise-level network transport infrastructure. The convergence of voice and data means that we’ve been able to standardise equipment. Installing managed Cisco switches across three offices to accommodate our high-capacity data needs has accommodated our telephony needs too.
• Adding more staff/capacity is really only a matter of purchasing a desktop phone, checking for spare switch ports and available bandwidth – all of which can be done relatively easily.

iStart: Any future expansion plans for your network?
Simpson: Expansion with this system is like adding building blocks to a LEGO set – once you have the initial kit all you need is more blocks and away you go. Since we’ve built the core infrastructure on a scalable, cost-effective and universal protocol, we can simply add a variety of building blocks in the form of web services, XML-based soft phones on laptops, wireless devices and anything else that will run within an IP infrastructure. Expansion is therefore certainly on the cards, but how we expand is almost entirely up to our imagination.

Further down the track we’re interested in integrating a number of advanced applications including desk-to-desk video conferencing. The ability for staff to collaborate between departments and inter-city from their desk offers huge savings based on travel time, travel expenditure and the overall productivity gains made when one can integrate international and multi-party meetings into one’s daily routines at one’s desk. We’ll soon be integrating our phone extensions into Windows Active Directory so we can access all staff on a company-wide basis through the directory services on the phones, and we’ve also conducted numerous trials with shared-screen training sessions. This enables an expert to be located in one location and yet service the training needs of different people in multiple cities.

The bottom line

Cisco’s VoIP technology allows current data, video, voice technologies and cabling to be converged into one infrastructure, greatly reducing operating costs through a reduction in maintenance, cabling infrastructure and call charges. The IBM IP Telephony solution is inherently flexible allowing Silverscreen to rapidly adapt its IT environment, which is highly dynamic with staff numbers increasing or decreasing quickly. “Cisco and IBM were able to provide us with the ability to quickly, easily and cheaply adapt to all situations,” says Simpson. “Time is of the essence in our industry and IBM made this target easy to reach. Everyone here loves the new system. It provides us with what we need now and with a little software upgrade, what we’ll need for the future.”

For more information on Silverscreen: www.silverscreen.co.nz

December 2003