How Triggerfish Animation Studios Keeps Cape Town and London in Sync with Resilio Active Everywhere

Triggerfish Animation Studios is a leading African animation house originating in Cape Town, South Africa, known for telling distinctively African stories and producing animation for global audiences. The studio's credits include feature films such as Khumba and Adventures in Zambezia, animated adaptations of Julia Donaldson books like Stick Man and The Scarecrows’ Wedding for the BBC, and recent series work for Netflix and Disney+.

For Ditiaan Moller, Manager of Information Technology at Triggerfish, the job is keeping a creative pipeline running smoothly across two studios, a UK data center, and a remote talent pool that increasingly spans Europe and beyond. He's the sole IT engineer supporting roughly 100 workstations, and his measure of a good day is one in which no one from the creative team needs to pause work for an IT intervention.

Going Global from the Southern Tip of Africa

Triggerfish was built around a single Cape Town studio, with all production storage and all artists on the same local network. That model worked beautifully until the studio took on a major feature production with a UK client, with creative work split between Cape Town and a new London studio. Suddenly, the same project assets (character files, scenes, renders, dependencies) needed to live on file servers in two places at once, ~10,000 km apart, with ~160 ms of latency between them.

The team tried the conventional options first. An IPSec VPN between sites topped out at 3–4 Mbps for file transfers. Fine for Active Directory traffic, useless for moving multi-gigabyte scenes, renders, and assets. Mounting Cape Town storage over the VPN was a non-starter; copying files manually took hours. FTP downloads from another international partner were already proving slow and unreliable. An open-source sync tool the team trialed broke things and had to be removed.

A Server-Sync Problem Without a Tolerable Server-Sync Tool

What Triggerfish needed was a modern file sync layer between Cape Town's production storage and a second storage location in the UK data center, something that could replace the VPN-and-FTP workaround, do the work that a legacy approach like Microsoft Windows DFS-Replication never could over a high-latency long-haul link, and stay invisible to the artists once it was running.

The team also evaluated commercial alternatives before turning to peer research, including a lengthy conversation with a longtime Resilio customer in South Africa whose use case closely mirrored Triggerfish's own.

The conclusion was clear: the project would launch on schedule, but the cross-site workflow wouldn't succeed without Resilio.

Replacing VPN-Bound File Transfers with Resilio WAN Optimization

Working with the Resilio engineering team and ERA, Triggerfish's UK infrastructure partner, the team deployed Resilio Active Everywhere as the connective layer between sites. Resilio agents run on Triggerfish's production storage in Cape Town and on production storage in ERA's UK data center, providing the London artists with local access at 10 Gbps.

A key early tuning step was routing Resilio traffic outside the existing IPSec tunnel. The first deployment pushed sync traffic over the VPN by default, immediately bottlenecking it back to the same 3–4 Mbps that Triggerfish was trying to escape. With direct support from Resilio engineering, the team reconfigured agents to run Resilio's WAN optimization protocol directly over the public internet, and the sync rate jumped from a few Mbps to maxing out the internet pipe.

Same Drive Letter, Either Side of the World

For Triggerfish, the user-facing design goal was an invisible sync layer. The artists shouldn't have to think about it. The same drive letter is mapped on both sides, Cape Town and London, so an artist in either studio gets the same workflow and the same familiar structure to the same project assets.

Triggerfish's pipeline team extended that further with an in-house launcher that customizes each artist's environment within their applications to match the studio they're working from, so the experience stays consistent in both locations.

A Render-Farm Extension, on the Same Sync Fabric

With cross-site sync working reliably, Triggerfish extended the same Resilio fabric to offload GPU rendering. The UK partner offers on-premises GPU render capacity in the same data center as the synced production storage; Triggerfish's Render Manager software dispatches jobs to nodes on either side of the link, with Resilio handling the data movement in both directions. The result is elastic render capacity with no cloud storage or egress fees and no separate data movement pipeline to maintain.

Built-In Operability for a One-Person IT Team

Triggerfish is a single-engineer IT shop, making operational simplicity and centralized data management hard requirements. The Resilio management console gives Ditiaan a real-time view of every job and every agent across the IT infrastructure. For ongoing monitoring, he set up a Resilio webhook to post job status into the team's Discord channel, adapting the existing Slack-format webhook with help from Resilio support. The pipeline team can see at a glance which jobs are completed, which are running, and which need attention.

In-app support ticketing automatically pulls the right logs. "I could teach my son to do it," Ditiaan notes. And the support team, even on the standard support tier, has consistently turned around fixes on the first reply.

A Cross-Studio Workflow That Runs on Resilio

With Resilio in production, the cross-studio workflow is now routine. To date, the platform has synchronized more than 90 TB and 11 million files between Cape Town and London, with recent weeks running around 6.9 TB and 175,000 files, and burst speeds reaching 1.6 Gbps. Headcount on the UK side roughly doubled in a recent month as the production ramped up, and the platform has absorbed the increase without intervention. Resilio WAN optimization has shaved roughly 33 TB off the raw data that those transfers would otherwise have had to push across the wire.

The end-to-end experience for the artists is the one Ditiaan was aiming for: changes saved in one studio show up in the other within a minute or two, and Resilio itself stays out of the way.

A Talent Pool That's No Longer Limited by Geography

The bigger business result is that Triggerfish can achieve its aim of working efficiently with a much more widely distributed team. With creative assets continuously synchronized across sites, and the option to extend Resilio to individual remote workstations as needed, the studio can hire wherever the right talent is. New collaborators have come on board from across Europe, and roles in regions like Egypt, where latency had previously made remote work impractical, are now in play.

Quiet Infrastructure, Loud Outcomes

For Ditiaan, the day-to-day measure is the absence of tickets. The artists don't think about how files get from Cape Town to London; they just open their software tools, find their assets where they expect them, and get to work.

Triggerfish runs on Resilio

For Triggerfish, Resilio is the operating layer that makes a multi-studio, multi-region production model viable from Cape Town. With the cross-site sync established and the render-farm extension in place, the team is now evaluating Resilio Active Everywhere for individual remote artists in other regions, including the U.S., where bringing the data to the user is the only way to make the work happen.

Animation pipelines don't wait for files to copy. Resilio keeps production assets synchronized across studios, data centers, and remote artists so that creative teams can collaborate at the speed of the schedule—regardless of where they sit on the map.

Ready to move faster? Schedule a demo to see how Resilio can support your animation or VFX pipeline.