DreamWorks Animation Production Process

Dreamworks Animation, which is based in Glendale, California, is an American animation studio that creates animated feature films, television programs, and online virtual worlds. On their website they have a 'Behind The Scenes' section, which gives information about their productions, their employees, their company culture, and the technology they work with. 
I found the section about the production process to be very informative and useful. The website allows you to browse through a slideshow which details each stage of the production of a film, from script writing through to release. It also gives the time frames for each of the stages. I found out, much to my surprise, that up to 18 months can be spend on the storyboarding process to get it just right! This really made me rethink my view on the importance of storyboarding in the development of animation.
By learning about each of the departments and the stages that they are responsible for, I got a better idea of what I would personally like to work in, if I ever was employed in a large studio. The visual development department looks very interesting, and a way to work specifically with creating artwork. Each feature film they create averages 5 years in production length before release.
I learned a lot of terminology through the slides such as 'armature,' 'rigging,' 'surfacing' and 'assets.'

A second section detailing the technical specifications of their films and the equipment they use at DreamWorks' studios was mind-blowing. In a single 90 minute feature, up to 120,000 frames need to be created and stored. The technology that's required for one film includes 300+ graphics workstations, 60+ million render hours, 17,000 cores used simultaneously, and upwards of 200+TB of disk space. That is a millions times more than anything I could ever aspire to achieve technically, let alone while still in university. I know that some smaller animation companies send their work for rendering to 'render farms' so that they don't have to spend a large budget or time on this labour-intensive process. DreamWorks artists use tablets like Cintiq, as well as scanning in hand-drawn images, which gives me more purpose in doing this myself for my own pre-production process.