Rethinking Production: How CREE8 and Entertainment Technology Center Collaborated on Production Workflows
Written By: Carin Mazaira
Contributors: Simon Green, Erik Weaver, Brian Wankum, and Ben Abergel
As production workflows evolve to meet the demands of distributed teams, increasing content volume, and emerging AI tools, the need for more unified, scalable systems has never been clearer. That’s exactly what the collaboration between CREE8 and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) set out to explore with the short films The Bends and Pathways.
Founded over three decades ago to bring studios together to solve shared challenges, ETC has long been at the forefront of industry innovation. For The Bends, the team leaned into that mission, experimenting with hybrid and AI-driven workflows while pushing the boundaries of what modern production can look like. For CREE8, the partnership was a natural fit.
“ETC is a great example of what happens when the industry comes together to solve real problems,” said Lisa Watts, CEO and Founder of CREE8. “This wasn’t about adding more tools, it was about simplifying how production works. When everything sits in one environment, teams can focus on creating, not managing the process around it.”
At the core of the collaboration was a shared goal: remove friction. By centralizing media, tools, and compute into a single cloud-based environment, the ETC team was able to eliminate many of the traditional barriers that slow production down like file transfers, version mismatches, and disconnected systems.
Instead, artists, editors, and technologists worked from the same source of truth, accessing identical media and tools regardless of location. This proved especially powerful for a globally distributed team, enabling real-time collaboration without the delays typically associated with remote workflows.
“What originally attracted us to CREE8 was the sophistication of their technology,” said Erik Weaver, Executive Producer at ETC. “We felt like it was above and beyond other tools we had explored.”
That sophistication translated into tangible results. Teams could spin up workstations on demand, scale resources as needed, and even work across multiple systems simultaneously (editing on one machine while rendering on another) without interrupting the flow of production.
Just as importantly, the platform created a shared space where creative and technical teams could collaborate more seamlessly.
“It really gave that common ground for everybody to speak and get on board,” Weaver added. “Creatives could log in, access everything they needed, and work as if they were on a single, unified system.”
For a project powered in part by AI, consistency and control were critical. By centralizing tools and models, the team ensured that every contributor, from artists in the U.S. to collaborators around the world, was working with the same setup, leading to more predictable and cohesive results. Traditional creative tools still played a key role in that process. Adobe Photoshop was used to refine and prepare imagery before moving into AI-driven video generation, while The Bends was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro, highlighting how familiar tools can seamlessly integrate into next-generation workflows.
Beyond efficiency gains, the collaboration also highlighted a broader shift in how production scales. Rather than adding more tools to manage complexity, ETC demonstrated the value of simplifying the environment itself.
Looking ahead, both ETC and CREE8 see this as just the beginning. With continued exploration into AI-driven workflows and cloud-native production, the partnership is poised to further redefine how creative teams work together globally, efficiently, and without compromise.