Jeff & Rob Visit Lucasfilm 198
Last fall Hemos started working for Perforce: one of their clients is Lucasfilm. One thing led to another, and last week I got to visit their Presidio facility in San Francisco. Their security policies prevent me from saying anything about the super sweet things I saw inside the building, but I can post this picture of us next to the Yoda statue outside the front door.
Thanks to Matt Janulewicz for getting us in the front door and showing us around, Daryll Jacobson for opening a cool door and Tina Mills for pressing click. I can now say that I've been physically closer to Starwars.com than I have to Slashdot.org since the 1998 when it lived under my desk.
Finally, the gauntlet has been thrown: if you work somewhere cool (Pixar? Apple? NASA? The White House? Comerica Park?) drop me an email! I am not above using T-Shirts as bribery to see cool places!
the /. staff (Score:5, Interesting)
I kinda like this sorta post. I used to feel a closer connection with the /. mods back in the day than recently. It didn't always feel like one Apple/Google press release after another like it does nowadays. It seemed like there was more editorial content. (Not that I'm asking for JonKatz to return...)
The other side of those cool places (Score:5, Interesting)
If you were an animator or technical director at Pixar, you could expect to live there during production. The film has to be done on time, you can't miss the Christmas season, etc. I saw many families bring dinner to Pixar almost every evening so that they could eat together, as mommy or daddy wasn't coming home until really late. I was in studio tools, not production, and thus was allowed to have a normal life - and seeing what happened to the production folks, I never wanted to be a technical director.
The pay was OK, but not great, and for technical folks the attribution was something you might have to slo-mo your VCR to see. There were 20 people who wanted a job standing behind every one that actually had a job in film, so there was no incentive for studios to pay better.
At the time (it may be better now) the tools were the result of 30 years of evolution, and you had to know about 30 languages to be a TD.
I've found my involvement in Open Source to be a lot more fulfilling.
Bruce
Oh, big deal. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that big a deal. I've been to Lucasfilm's sound stage at "Kerner Optical" (which used to be a cover story for Lucasfilm.) That's where they do physical effects and model work. Got to see their prop and camera shops, and some cameras used for notable shots that fans probably care about but I don't. They were the first to put a camera in a carbon-fibre housing, that camera has been through many crashes and explosions, and it still works. Nice engineering.
They were doing some R&D work on 3D cameras where the separation between the cameras could be varied dynamically. Watching that on a 3D monitor while someone twiddles the interocular distance is a non-fun visual experience, close to headache-inducing.
They were showing off FrameFree [framefree.com], which is a frameless video compression technology. It decomposes the image into layers which are then morphed from frame to frame, allowing arbitrarily slow motion. They sold that off, but some of the technology for cleanly decomposing images went into 2D to 3D conversion technology.
The most unusual thing about the place is that almost all the employees have been there for decades. Someone who'd been there three years was referred to as the new guy. You just don't see that kind of low employee turnover any more.
I've been to some computer animation places. They're just cube farms, not very interesting. They used to have high-end SGI workstations, but now it's all PC. (I saw that transition between 1998 and 2002; on my first visit to Sony Imageworks, the shop was 90% SGI machines, with a few PCs. Four years later, 80% PCs, with a few SGI machines for legacy work. SGI's "Silicon Studio" division is long gone, and the Computer Museum has their building.)
Watching a really good animator use a high-end animation package makes you realize that some people have really, really, good 3D visualization skills. There's a classic comment from some sculptor that he just chips away the stone until the object emerges. That's what working 3D artists do all day. Fast. There's much drawing and little adjustment. Pros don't tweak meshes; they draw them.
If you're not into either the "Hollywood thing" or fandom, dealing with the film industry is generally frustrating. Either they're in pre-production and have trouble coming up with a valid credit card, or they're in production and want a new feature yesterday.