Rwanda’s dynamic growth has led to unique opportunities for innovation, inspiring ambitious projects like Memphis Grace MacPherson’s goal to open the first themed attraction in the country, a Soaring-over-Rwanda flying ride.. As a Senior at the University of Southern California, Grace combined her passion for themed attractions with giant screen filmmaking to create an accessible experience showcasing Rwanda's stunning scenery.

International collaboration presents challenges though, such as quick global transfers and ensuring the security of digital media traveling across borders. With Grace and her cinematographer Hunter Hartz's footage at risk during travel – and with critical deadlines looming – the project needed a robust, reliable solution to streamline their workflow and protect their work.

“We needed to get our footage back to our team in Los Angeles as quickly as possible. We needed the peace of mind to know our footage wouldn’t be lost in transit and we really wanted to get notes from our IMAX professor on the framing since it is unique compared to traditional film or television framing,” said Hunter Hartz.

Enter Nebula from GB Labs, an intuitive cloud-based storage solution enabling seamless collaboration. Leveraging Storj distributed cloud object storage as its backend, Nebula provided a revolutionary advantage.

Storj transforms underutilized global storage space into a massive global network, eliminating the need for costly data centers and providing high durability and performance. The cost is up to 90% less than traditional cloud storage solutions. Plus, since Storj leverages existing hardware, it helps customers dramatically reduce their carbon footprint.

“Today, it’s common to have production on one continent, editing on another, and visual effects on additional continents,” shared Matt Scott, Senior Pre-Sales Engineer at GB Labs. “Storj is the foundation for our cloud service Nebula and allows our customers to securely store media files in a highly reliable elastic cloud with extremely fast access from anywhere in the world. This empowers creators like Grace and Hunter to  focus on their craft with a solution that’s much more affordable and better for the environment.”

Nebula’s strength lies in its robust architecture, capable of operating over weak internet connections and ensuring that Grace’s and Hunter’s data was safe and continuously accessible, no matter where their project took them.

“Working with Nebula was an absolute relief,” said Hunter. “Knowing our footage was already secure before we left eliminated a ton of stress for us and it was so simple to do. It was as easy as dragging and dropping the footage into our mounted workspace.”

Since Storj is global by default, Hunter could then edit the footage directly from the shared workspace while it uploaded in the background. “By the time we were ready to shoot again, our collaborators in LA could open the project, and all the footage linked immediately.”