4 Ways Illumination MacGuff Used Shotgun to Create Universal's Most Profitable Film Ever

We’ve been working very closely with animation studio, Illumination MacGuff, for years in the evolution of their studio and pipeline and are proud to say that Shotgun was most recently used to help the studio stay on track and manage production on Universal Studio’s most profitable film to date, Despicable Me 2.

For Despicable Me 2, Illumination MacGuff worked with over 400 artists, 50 team leaders, 25 managers, and 30 technical members. So keeping everyone in sync and up to date was key to the success of the film.

4 Ways Shotgun Was Used by Illumination MacGuff

1) Shotgun let MacGuff move quicker on this film than other films they’d worked on in the past. In their own words: 

"The development cycle for any animated film can run up to four years, and managing our productions on Shotgun helps us reduce this time by more than half."

-Etienne Pecheux, Supervising Technical Director

2) Shotgun allowed the studio to always have accurate statistics on almost any part of the pipeline, such as rendering and cost stats. This allowed the studio to carefully monitor if the film was staying on budget.

3) The simplicity of the Shotgun API and core engine behind the UI made coding dedicated tools very easy for MacGuff’s developers.

4) Shotgun centralized all the production data, eliminating discrepancies between production reports. Producers at the studio could then design reports within Shotgun to share that data with different types of people at the studio such as other producers, supervisors, and artists.