How a Major Media Conglomerate Automates VFX Production Supply Chain Setup at Scale

The challenge

Every new production means standing up storage locations for camera media, dailies, and deliverables; projects in MAM or review tools; and ingest or transfer workflows that VFX media later moves through. Doing that by hand took several weeks, was error-prone, and tied up production services. Missing setup blocked the show's media supply chain. The team needed automation that could set this up consistently, handle peak periods, and run with little manual intervention so they could support more shows without adding headcount.

The solution

Flo Platform automates VFX production supply chain setup when new shows are greenlit or configurations change. Workflows create storage locations, provision MAM or review projects, and configure ingest, transfer, or transcode paths. Those setups are the entry points VFX media later moves through: dailies land in the folders created, and deliverables route through the ingest workflows configured. The integration scaled through a busy second half of the year and ran largely in fully automated mode across multiple shows.

Built on AWS

This solution runs on AWS. Flo Platform uses:

• Amazon ECS and Elastic Load Balancing for the workflow engine and traffic entry
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for durable workflow state
• Amazon ElastiCache (Valkey) for the work queue
• AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS for event intake and buffering
• Amazon S3 for application and workflow artifacts
• Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and alerting

The results

• New show setup takes minutes, not weeks. Standing up storage, MAM projects, and ingest paths for a VFX production used to take several weeks of manual work. Each automated run now finishes in minutes. Flo ran 33,799 of these setup workflows across the premium slate in 2025.
• One person supports the full premium slate. Without automation, Flomenco estimates the same work would need about 4 to 6 production-services people. The team added more shows without growing headcount: one person handles back-office setup across the slate with Flo.
• Over 96% of runs succeed with little manual work. About 3% failed or errored and were investigated and corrected; under 1% were cancelled, mostly during testing or validation.