Lucas's New HQ

pin_gween writes "The KS City Star reports George Lucas (of the "It's not about the money" fame) has opened a new headquarters for digital film works. The campus has, among several movie theaters, "data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports. Fiber-optics cables are connected to every artist desktop, allowing high-resolution images on each computer. In all, there are 600 miles of cable throughout the campus's four buildings." Not too shabby, or cheap."

Re:Fine and Good

[Adrilla]

Yes, all that technology is nice, but ultimately worthless, if the movies coming out of it have no substance.

It's not worthless if it's going to be making him money, let's say oh about 50 million on opening day. Indy Jones is coming, and the money that movie is bound to make will pay for this technology many times over. Plus the Star Wars TV show(s), video games, etc. Sure the quality of the movie may not be what you want. But, it's obvious someone is watching them, in fact it's highly likely this is a genius move, because it allows the people there to work diligently with the most minimal of technological setbacks. Some might say this is overdue at the Lucas camp (not that they were exactly working in the stone age at the old campus). Bottom line, the work may not be top quality film making, but it will pay for the technology, and the technology will pay for itself by being the tool that creates blockbusters.

Re:Fine and Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the "it's cool to bash Lucas and the prequels" comments like yours demonstrate your inability to understand who and what the movies are for. My 9 year old son loves the hell out of Episodes 1 for example, more than any movie he has ever seen. Just because you and I have outgrown it doesn't mean he has. In fact, 15 minutes into Empire Strikes Back (my fav of all time) he passes out from boredom.

Re:Fine and Good

[spoonsman]

That's probably because many people (especially younger kids) just see the "pretty" CG factor stacked on top of some slick actions scenes, and it keeps their attention.

As an adult, have you ever looked back and watched movies or shows you loved as a kid and realized how completely god awful they are with their completely inane storylines, acting, and plot? That's exactly what the prequals are.

I loved the original trilogy as a kid and still love the original trilogy as an adult, not just because I have fond childhood memories of them but because they are good movies. They are what the prequals should have been- loved by children yet also loved by adults.

OVERKILL: Great Movie != Great Animation

[reporter]

("Star Wars" must be the #1 movie saga of geeks because, during the last 5 weeks surrounding the debut of "Star Wars III", Slashdot has featured at least 1 "Star Wars"-related topic per week. <chuckle>)

Lucas and his crew have already done a great job with animation. He spurred the growth of an entire industry that generates computer images: special effects, animation, etc. We have already reached a point where we can economically fill an entire movie with head-turning animation. Consider "Shrek II" and the latest episode of "Star Wars" (SW).

Yet, such a feat does not necessarily translate into a great movie. Consider SW I & II.

SW IV had limited special effects and no animated characters, due to the limits of economical computer-image generation, yet SW IV is far superior in the pace (adequately slow) and the depth of its plot, compared to SW I. The limited computer-image generation forced the writer and the director to focus on the story.

SW I and II are precisely what can go wrong when computer-image generation overwhelms the story. Did you ever notice how, in SW I and II, Yoda's interaction in a 3-way conversation (i.e. with 2 human actors) is awkward and weird? Yoda does not enter and exit a conversation with the same naturalness that a human being (i.e. not computer-generated image) would. His facial expressions are also unnatural. The human actors cannot produce the right facial expressions when they are looking in his direction. When the human actor do look in his direction, they do not seem to be looking straight at him.

Of course, the wonderful "Shrek" saga is an exception to my thesis.

Re:American POP

[stefanlasiewski]

I remember that Lucas drove a hard bargain, and got a really good deal from San Francisco. The deal was pretty controversial, but most people seem happy with with the deal today.

There was a big competition between several Bay Area cities (and Marin County) to get Lucas to move to their Area. Each City made sweet offers-- cheap rent, pay for some of the upgrades, give Lucas alot of freedom to do what he wanted, etc.

I think SF actually did ask Lucas to help wire parts of the Presidio, but he said no-- and threatened to close the other studio in San Francisco and move to another are altogether.

SF was looking for a large business to redevelop the abandoned land and boost the economy in the area. They actually had trouble getting bids for that particular site for a variety of reasons.

The site where the studio now stands was occupied by Letterman Hospital: a big abandoned, ugly asbestos-filled hospital which wasn't up to earthquake standards, and a large unused parking lot.

I was born in Letterman Hospital, and worked next door to the site for 3 years-- we ran the only T-1 into the Presidio for several years.

Re:Fine and Good

[fm6]

Lucas graduated from film school at USC [usc.edu]. Before he became a Visionary Mogul, he actually made one or two decent films, including American Graffiti. I think he has a small problem, and a big one. The small problem is that he hasn't actually done that much writing or directing since he became a VM, so he's out of practice. The big problem is that he is a VM, so nobody is in a position to tell him that his shit smells. Especially when that shit consistently makes a profit.

Some of that's going on with the big new campus in San Francisco. The dude's in love with digital media, and he's lost interest in the model-making that is still at the heart of most space opera SFX. You won't find a model shop at the new campus: that group remained behind in the industrial park in San Rafael. Now digital media is certainly cool -- but anybody who's seen Sky Captain will tell you that virtual sets are not quite ready for prime time!

Re:OVERKILL: Great Movie != Great Animation

[Tim Browse]

Of course, the wonderful "Shrek" saga is an exception to my thesis.

Really? I liked Ep III, whereas I found Shrek to be dull, predictable, clichéd and poorly animated*.

I remember last xmas Shrek was on TV and it bugged the hell out of me. Then a couple of hours later I watched the DVD of Monsters, Inc. that my sister got for xmas. Talk about chalk and cheese. Monsters, Inc. made me think "Yes, I wasn't imagining it, Shrek is poor."

Why it's so successful, I'm not entirely sure. Probably that darn donkey.

(* This is a reletive term - I mean poorly animated considering the praise it received)

Re:I wish I had fibre optic on my desktop

[InvalidError]

That would not be terribly efficient.

Most rendering farms probably load all scene textures/geometry to allocated renderers then the workstation simply queue frame requests to each renderer, reducing the bandwidth requirement to little more than finished frames' (1920x1080x3*10/8 = 7.8MB/frame) transfer, assuming the scenes are fairly lenghty or the software is written to cache across scenes/jobs and the scenes use a substantial common texture/geometry base.

So the gigabytes of textures/geometry probably only apply while the rendering farm is doing a cold-start with clean caches. The rendering job's setup becomes even more bandwidth-trivial if the whole thing can be setup using multicast - setting up one or a hundred nodes at once takes practically no additionnal time in that case.