One of the leaders in digital storytelling is DreamWorks Animation, known for hit movies such as Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda and more. On Tuesday, leaders from DreamWorks Animation were joined by technology industry leaders of HP and Intel for a panel titled, Technology’s Impact on Digital Storytelling, about technology’s impact on the art of digital storytelling and the role it plays in the constantly-evolving creative process.

Panelists included DreamWorks Animation heads: Jill Hopper, Global Head of Production; Chris Stover, Head of Digital Cinematography and Previsualization and Jeff Wike, Animation CTO. Also on the panel was Shane Wall, CTO and Global Head of HP Labs and Chris Walker, vice president in the Client Computing Group at Intel and also the general manager of the Mobility Client Platform Group.

DreamWorks currently has 20 movies in production, according to Hopper. She said even though they only release a couple of movies a year, it takes four to five years to complete a movie. With each movie, the company is constantly evolving the platform—or tool sets used to create the animations to try to create the most rewarding experience for the audience, Hopper said.

“We are constantly evolving what those platforms look like, depending on what the script says,” she said. “When we’re at the very early stages of reading the script, Jeff is engaged in terms of ‘Okay what are the challenges,’ We look at the scripts. We’re told what the goals would be to create that experience and then we set our heads on, ‘Okay, what might some of the solutions be to make it a better possible experience.’”

Wike echoed Hopper and added that for each movie, DreamWorks isn’t looking to reinvent the wheel, but reinvent a portion of the wheel.

“We look at how technology plays a role,” he said. “We look at the tools we develop, and what are those technologies which will help achieve a particular look or creative ambition in that regard.”

He said DreamWorks also looks at app technology and which tools to bring in or create to help their artists be more creative.

Intel and HP work closely with DreamWorks to help build hardware for the studio to help them achieve their creative ambitions, Walker said.

“Our goal is to provide you with form and to provide the capabilities so that technology can be a little bit out of the way,” he said to the DreamWorks panelists. “It’s not the focus of the process, but you can focus on your artistry. That’s just a continuous drive, that we work together as technologists and artists, with HP and Intel. I think that a lot of what goes into how we think about how we architect a chip, how we use software together, we’re really driven off of that.”

Another technology that DreamWorks is looking into integrating with their platform is Virtual Reality. VR was a hot topic at this year’s South by Southwest, and it seemed a wide range of panelists from different backgrounds spoke about the new emerging technology and dipping their feet in it. It wasn’t surprising to hear that DreamWorks took their first scratch at it, releasing a VR experience last November according to Hopper.

“We’ve started to bring it into part of our storytelling experience with feature films as well,” she said. “The interesting thing about VR and AR is, that it’s in that infancy, where you don’t quite know what the approach is successfully for storytelling. I think as it evolves, we’re going to get to experiment with that, and at the same time, potentially crack open something enormous.”

Other examples of DreamWorks testing new technology came from their “How to Train Your Dragon” movie. It was their first movie to implement camera capture technology. This allowed the artists and studio to work with the director in a more collaborative way, to do things such as scouting sets and making changes in real time.

“It was also the ability to interact with the performances post-animation,” Stover said. “That relationship between the camera and the actor feels really organic and brings itself to screen in a much more organic and cinematic way.”

Motion capture technology was influential on DreamWorks, and something they’ve expanded beyond “How to Train Your Dragon.”

“And here we are 10 years later, we’ve got a huge motion capture stage that has 62 cameras on it,” Stover said. “We can do up to eight actors at one time. We can do full camera capture on that stage. And that ability to go down there and explore with all the parties involved, and really interact in a way that becomes much more fluid and quicker.”

One of the things that makes DreamWorks successful in constantly improving their movies, technology and vision, is their highly collaborative environment, according to Wike.

“We have the technology teams, the artistic teams sitting together, and it’s all about collaboration,” he said. “A lot of the technology that we launch, and that we develop, is driven by the arts. They’re the ones that come up with a lot of the ideas of, ‘This is how I want to work.’”

DreamWorks is also highly collaborative with Intel and HP, which lends to their success.

“They’ve (HP and Intel) been great collaborators with us,” Wike said. “They helped when we went to multi-core processing that became sort of massive multi-core processing, with the help of Intel, actually, we architected our entire tool set where they brought in their engineers that worked side-by-side on campus with ours to really figure out, ‘how are we going to do that,’ ‘how should we be re-architecting it.’ And, we provided feedback on compiler changes or on building blocks or library changes and things like that, so it was a great collaboration.”

Looking to the future, the panelists discussed new and emerging technologies they felt were interesting and could be used to help improve production, films or the technology process.

For Hopper, she was most excited about technology that could be used to increase collaboration on a global level.

“I think there’s an incredible opportunity for collaboration at a global level that will sort of leap from where we are today into a far deeper experience with artists all over the world,” she said. “I do think it can broaden the people that participate: the designers, the animators. You could be on the other side of the planet but still be working on a movie, so I think that would be just tremendous.”

For Wiker, he said he looked forward to solving the thought process around thinking about creating within a three dimensional space, when an artists goes from a computing task to thinking about the fidelity of a pixel to a box.

“That’s going to be a new layer of challenge and opportunity for our technologies,” he said. “It’s going to be about spreading out those workloads, where the participants bring that into mobile form factors, or ways that anybody can have at their home desk or on the road.”

Stover was most excited about technology that could improve the processes used by previsualization artists. He said previz artists run on small teams and are required to be multi-disciplined. They must understand filmmaking, cinematography, computer animation software, such as Maya and film editing software, such as Newt.

“To run small teams like that, you need that mobile computing power that just allows them to get the job done,” he said. “They’ve got to iterate fast, they’ve got to move through a lot of content and to me, that’s exciting.”

DreamWorks, HP and Intel will continue pushing the bar in the film animation industry and it will be interesting to see what new technologies and processes develop by them, and how they push new technologies such as VR with storytelling.