Digital SFX Wizard Answers Slashdot Questions

Here are 10+ plus answers to Slashdot questions from motion picture digital effects expert Thad Beier. He chose the additional questions himself. (Yes, he's on Slashdot almost every day; we asked him to do the interview after reading many intelligent comments he's posted.) Anyway, there's some fine insight into the intersection of moviemaking, graphic arts, and computer science here, brought to you by an award-winning member of the film industry who just happens to be a fellow Slashdot reader.

Are 'FX programming' days numbered?
by Anonvmous Coward
Every year, 3D packages get more and more sophsticated. Not just in terms of rendering effects, but in their scripting capabilities as well. Do you see a day where the artist will be able to handle the rendering features and the scripting of a 3D prog so well that it'll no longer be necessary to have a dedicated programmer on board?

Is there a particular type of problem that will always need a programmer?

Thad:
First, I feel that the difference between 'scripting' and 'programming' is nonexistent; both are programming, albeit in different languages with different development environments. People can, and do, write thousand-line MEL scripts for Maya -- which are every bit as complex as anything written in C. With each new animation system, the scripting languages become more powerful, and subsume larger modules as primitives within the language -- this should allow non-programmers (or, more realistically, people who don't consider themselves programmers) to create significant custom systems with reasonable short scripts.

Secondly, though, I feel that there will always be a need in movies for people who are predominantly programmers. Films have to compete with each other and with the library of pre-existing films, and one way that is done is by continually pushing the state of the art. A consistent request from filmmakers is for 'something nobody has seen before'. Often that means creating custom tools; or building scripts and shaders far beyond the capabilities of non-programmers.

It is true that as time has gone on, the percentage of people on visual effects teams who consider themselves primarily programmers has fallen. One reason is that when doing 500 shots of a mouse for Stuart Little you only have to create the mouse once, but you still need hundreds of people to do the artistic tasks of animation, lighting, and compositing. That doesn't mean that the programmers aren't important, they are the key to ensuring that the artists can be productive.

Shaders
by f00Dave
How much overlap is there between the programable graphics processing units (AKA "shaders") found on modern game platforms and the software/hardware used in the special effects industry? Would programming skills for one translate to the other?

BTW, I realize that special effects are half artistry, half mathematics and half sweaty work: kudos from a 'GL hacker... [;-)]

Thad:
I note that some slashdotters have criticized your math, but you have hit upon a fundamental truth of visual effects, that the work takes far more than the available time.

While it is conceivable that there is overlap possible between programming of games hardware and writing shaders for visual effects, I haven't seen too many people making the move from games into FX; mostly it is the other way around. Certainly many people in the games business are clamoring for visual effects and other film artists to help bring cinematic ideas and qualities to the games world.

The interesting new wrinkle in this is the Cg language from Nvidia. It's a new, high-lvel language for writing shaders. Cg is then compiled down to microcode run on the graphics hardware in the machine. While I had been skeptical, now I think that this might dramatically change the way that rendering is done. The work of the visual effects and game shader-writers could be exactly the same. It wouldn't surprise me if future software renderers use graphics hardware to speed up the process.

Cost
by Fembot
When films are labled as "100$ Million on special effects" where does most of that money go? On rendering hardware or what?

Thad:
I don't think that any movies have had $100 Million in special effects, yet -- unless you count Dinosaur or Final Fantasy -- which are animated (as opposed to FX) films. That said, the overwhelming cost on any films for effects at this point goes to the creative people. Especially today, the hardware is virtually free. (In some cases, the hardware is literally free as a company will donate machines in return for good PR.)

A reasonable estimate for the cost is 75% for artists, and 25% for everything else. This has changed dramatically over the digital visual effects era which started around 1990 -- back then it was probably exactly the opposite. But machines have gotten much cheaper and animators have become more expensive, and that trend will probably continue. It's interesting that people talk about how much cheaper Linux PCs are compared to SGI machines (say), but truly both machines have almost the same cost (zero) compared to the cost of the animator who is using the machine. The choice of workstation should be entirely based on what makes the artist most productive.

Directors approach?
by FurryFeet
I'm guessing you get to work pretty closely to directors. If so, can you tell us what is their approach to the new tools technology has given them? Are they still "thinking celluloid" made cheaper by rendering it digitally, or do they really seek to break the mold and make shots that were previously impossible?

Thad:
The job of a movie director is to harness the skills of hundreds of talented, unique, possibly difficult people to create his vision and tell his story. In our experience, directors always request the ideas and proposals from his creative team; and they listen to that advice. The FX team is hired to help make the movie, and are trusted to help make the decisions. In most cases, the director will work very closely with the FX supervisor when shooting the shots that will have effects, asking for help and comment on all aspects of the shot. After the ability to get the most out of his team, though, the most important quality of a director is decisiveness -- once all of the input has been gathered, everybody has to march in the same direction.

Every director we have worked with has been extremely interested in any ideas we could contribute to making shots cheaper, better, easier to shoot, or cheaper. They want to get the best images on film, and any resources saved on one shot can make the next one better.

best way to get into the industry?
by josepha48
What is the best way to get into the computer generated special effects industry? Is it who you know or what you know? If it is what you know what should one know? (Programming, graphics tools, etc...).

Thad:
Well, my first sincere, if unhelpful answer is "Are you sure that you want to?" It isn't really an industry in the traditional sense -- there is little or no job security, there are long hours typically with no overtime paid, the stress can be extreme and the rewards are not great. There are almost no rational reasons to choose CG visual effects as a career. So think about it before making that choice. If it really is the most important thing in the world for you, then read on.

Every person is different, and every position to be filled is different, so any advice given will either be too specific to be generally useful, or so broad as to be a platitude, but I'll do my best. Over the last few years it is my impression that there have been far more applicants trying to get into the field than available jobs; that might just be a cyclical problem or it might be persistent.

A solid undergraduate education is always a good thing. Some basic art experience is helpful, to learn color theory, layout -- basically learn what makes a good image good. Knowledge of mathematics and elementary physics is useful, to know how the world works. General computer experience is helpful, for example the ability to write and understand shell scripts. To get a job at a large facility a familiarity with the most commonly used tools is helpful.

Clearly you would like to have some animation experience. Computer animation is useful, but 2D hand-drawn animation is also an exceptionally good way to learn how to bring images to life.

When preparing a reel of your work, a few great shots is better than a large volume of mediocre work. You want something to make your reel stand out from the rest of them. Play to your strengths; concentrate on what you do best. If the work on your reel includes shots done by a team of people, be certain to call out your particular contribution. A demonstrated ability to work on teams with other creative people is a definite plus.

The Siggraph show every year is a good place to meet recruiters from many companies in a few days. It takes place in late July or early August. This year's conference took place last week, and all of the big companies demonstrated vigorous recruiting efforts. A few companies have great pages to assist people in planning their careers. Here is the employment FAQ from Pixar and the one from PDI. While they are animation companies as opposed to visual effects companies, their advice is still appropriate, by and large.

What movies have impressed you?
by Anonvmous Coward
When somebody has intimate knowledge about how a movie is made, it gets really hard to make their eyes jump out of their head.

For example, there's a scene in the Director's Cut of Robocop where Alex Murphy is just about to be shot in the head by the lead bad dude. The camera is pointing right at Alex's face, then swings around behind him. As soon as the camera is behind him the bad guy fires a gun, the back of Alex's head explodes and you can see a hole clean through it. This whole scene was one smooth camera movement, no edits.

I was *stunned* to find out that Alex was a puppet. They were able to make a puppet that totally convinced me that Peter Weller was sitting in front of this guy about to get his head blown off. I could not believe that they were able to do one that convincing.

I'm curious, what movies have had that affect on you? "OMG! I had no idea that was an effect!"

Thad:
Your example is a classic of FX misdirection. Another one is in 'Spiderman'. We see Peter Parker with his shirt off pretty early in the movie, and he's the scrawny little twerp that he's supposed to be, and you accept it without a second thought. Later, after he's been bitten, he takes off his shirt and he's totally ripped. Not until that point do you say "hey, wait a minute! How did they do that effect!" When, of course, the effect happened in the first shot with a body replacement that you never expected. I was blown away, it was just so cool, and so easy. The best effects are those that you would never expect, and that by the time you realize that they must have been effects they are over.

These days almost every film has FX shots that nobody could possibly see. Our first film was 'Showgirls', and I defy anybody to find the dozen shots we did in that movie -- they are not in-your-face effects. Two of our more recent films, 'The Fast and The Furious', and 'For Love of The Game' were praised in the Los Angeles Times and Variety as films with a refreshing lack of special effects. It's not that they're missing obvious things; it's just that FX can be undetectable.

So, when you say if there's anything where I'd say "I had no idea that was an effect", well, it's certainly true -- but for most of those shots I still don't know that it was an effect.

Project you'd like to tackle?
by seldolivaw
Although recently a lot of the big names in science fiction and fantasy are finally making it onto the screen in a plausible way (e.g. Tolkein) there are still plenty of great books out there that haven't even been optioned. If you could turn any science-fiction/fantasy book or series into a movie, which would it be?

[My personal choice: the Foundation saga by Asimov. So huge! Such a great plot! So eminently filmable! Somebody make this movie, dammit! :-)]

Thad:
Surprisingly, and contrary to your question, classic SF books like The Foundation Trilogy and Ender's Game are always in play; we get scripts or proposals for these every couple of years. You're not the only one that wants to see these books filmed; it's very difficult to do, though. While the tremendous success of The Lord of The Rings is on everybody's mind, don't forget that people have been trying for years to make those books into films with limited success. A good book has such scope and detail that it's hard to distill it into a reasonable-length movie. While I'd love to see a movie made from Stephenson's 'Snowcrash', any reasonable length movie would have to leave out at least half of the stuff that makes the book great.

Short stories are a better bet. The astonishing success of movie versions of Philip K. Dick's short stories would have completely bewildered him, but they are great source material. I'd love to see a John Varley short story -- say, 'The Phantom of Kansas' -- although I admit that 'Millenium', based on the book-length version of his short story 'Air Raid', was perhaps the worst movie I've ever seen.

Reduction in man-hours for CG?
by ceswiedler
At one point, as a film student, I was interested in computer animation as a way for a single person or small group to produce a film, without the expense of locations, casting, cameras, etc. I thought that soon, as hardware and software improved, it would be possible for me to create a film on my own computer at home.

But my experience in animation in college taught me that increasing hardware capacity doesn't reduce the time it takes to produce a film or demo reel; it simply increases the quality of the final output. I imagine that the modelling, animation, and rendering of the scenes in Tron took as much human time as comparable scenes in Fellowship of the Ring. It's possible to render Tron-quality CG in realtime on a modern PC, but nobody wants to watch it.

My question is this: do you think it will ever be possible to produce a full-length CG film in about a man-year or less, with effects which are reasonbly "modern" for the time? Will the technology curve eventually flatten out, once we get to a certain point where the human eye can't really tell the difference? Or is it implausible to think that a single person or small group could provide all of the artistic input (scriptwriting, directing, modelling, animation, acting, etc) to produce a full film, even ignoring all technological constraints?

Thad:
There are movies created by small teams of people; and some of these will be CG generated films. They won't be "Toy Story", though, they'll be motion-capture or cg-puppet films with relatively simple lighting setups; I don't think that you can do high-quality animation quickly, except through some kind of performance capture. There's a sort of Moore's Law at work with state-of-the-art animation where the complexity of scenes doubles every couple of years. Animators always will wait a certain amount of time for their frames to render, on the order of 15 minutes to an hour -- and that time hasn't changed even though computers are 1000 times the speed they were 10 years ago.

Your question has been answered in the affirmative last year by 'Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius'. That was a relatively small team of people working for just a few man years; and they created an incredibly successful film. Compared to 'Monsters Inc.' it wasn't state-of-the-art, but compared to say 'Rugrats in Paris', you'd have to say that it was.

I think your question about the technology curve flattening out means that you're asking whether at some point the most elaborately specified scene might render in real-time. That it's not inconceivable but it is unlikely. It's possible that computer speed will finally outstrip the ability of an animator to create complexity, so that frames will render that fast; but I think it's more likely that database-amplification techniques will allow the specification of arbitrarily complex scenes.

To some extent what makes movies interesting is that a single two-hour movie can contain the distilled essence of a thousand man-years of work, and if it was a well managed process you can see each hour of effort up on the screen. You can see these movies over and over, and always see something new. It's like a tidal wave of information flooding over you. A small team of people won't be able to do that; but they can make perfectly good smaller movies.

Killing the Classics
by Skyshadow
Several directors have recently released "special editions" of their classic movies which subtly change the films by using computers effects to either clean up the old effects or (far worse) alter the original film.

The problem that I have with this is twofold: First, these "special editions" seem to be the ones that show up on TV and on video rental shelves, so that they and not the original become the pervasive copy.

Second, I can foresee a day when older movies are edited in this fashion so they can be remarketed to audiences with more "modern" attitudes (think similar to Speilburg taking the guns out of the hands of the pursuing authorities in the ET rerelease).

Do you believe that, as a creative professional, you have any sort of ethical duty to resist these sorts of changes? Is there a line to be drawn between merely cleaning up the original effects and replacing them entirely (as in the Star Wars special edition), or between effects-patchup and all-out content alteration (aka, the wussification of Han Solo by having Greedo shoot first)? Do you feel that old films should be left alone, or do you consider them more as ongoing acts of creation?

Thad:
I do not like the changing of movies. A movie, to me, reflects the time that it was created and becomes a kind of historical document. On the other, dominant hand, it is completely the choice of the owner of a film to do with it what he pleases.

I can understand the feeling that a movie is somehow owned by society at some point, but my point of view is different. Making a film is tremendously hard, making a good one far harder still -- and with that effort comes the right to muck it up down the road if that's what one decides to do. So, I don't see an ethical dilemma at all. I think that the place to make your protest felt is as a critic and as a movie patron; vote with your wallet. A related problem is that movies have a relatively short lifetime. The first Star Wars film reportedly had deteriorated quite a bit before the Special Edition was created; as the dyes in the film don't have good long-term stability. There will be a fifty-year period of movies that will be lost unless extraordinary (and unlikely) efforts are made. In the near future, though, all movies will be digital at some point in the process, and they have at least a fighting chance of being around for a long time. There are several digital-post facilities being set up now, which scan the whole film to allow better color correction and editing -- the most striking use of this was on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where the final movie was dramatically color-corrected throughout in a way not possible with optical means.

question for thad
by Jucius Maximus
Thad: When designing tools for making 3D scenes or characters, how much does real world physics play into what is generated? Do you use fluid mechanical models to generate the flow of water over a waterfall or the movement of a large tree affected by a mass of air? Do you use vibro aoustical and biomechanical models to determine they way a CG mechanised character will walk?

In essence, how much do you take real physics into account when designing something a CG item to emulate a 'real' item on screen? What is the balance between physical limits and creative freedoms?

Thad:
Our charter is to create the sequence that the director of the film wants for his movie; that usually means building things that look and move like things do in real life. Often we would use real-world physics to do this. Typically, though, we take extremely simplified views of the real world to make the computations more simple, and to make them run faster.

As an example of physics in action, Nick Foster at PDI created a simplified fluid dynamics model to be used for animation; this was used to create several shots in ANTZ and Shrek. One of the big problems with simulation, as opposed to animation, is that it is difficult to control. Typically one sets initial conditions and then lets the simulation run. Having a system that runs very quickly enables the artist using the tool to try many different initial conditions, to try to create the desired final result. A slow, but more physically accurate solution would have been worthless if the animator couldn't get to a reasonable result.

Often what is done is an absurdly simplified model of reality is chosen, then it is made more accurate (and slow) until it looks good enough for the film. On our recent movie 'Showtime', we had to do a waterfall bursting out of a building, and we simulated the motion of water with air-drag, then simulated the water dragging the air with it, to get the characteristic motion of a waterfall; but we didn't have to go any further than that and simulate viscosity of the water or evaporation.

ILM has done some wonderful work simulating the dynamics of creatures, creating models of bones, muscles, fat, and skin. These give a character like a dinosaur a 'weight' that just can't be animated by hand. These dynamics are a great cue to they audience for how big and heavy these creatures are.

One curious reality of the FX world is that often reality is not what is wanted. A classic example of this is starfields. In any real-world photograph, the stars are invisible, they are far far darker than anything else in the scene. Directors often want stars in the sky to go with their actors, though; so that is what they get.

Finally, there are times when straightforward animation is the best approach. For the movie Red Planet, we had to create zero-g fire. I spent a few weeks trying to simulate the flow of smoke and fire in a zero-g environment, when my colleague Jamie Dixon thought that he could just animate all the shots by hand in a couple of days -- which he proceeded to do. When CalTech's physics department reviewed the movie for the Los Angeles Times, they panned every bit of science in the movie, except for the zero-g fire; which they thought looked "pretty cool."

CGI alternatives
by Strange Ranger
Do you think CGI can too often be seen as a "suppressor" of other art forms? The specific example in my head right now is Old Puppet Yoda vs. New CGI Yoda, we haven't seen (AFAIK) any major puppeteering work in cinema in a long time. Other possibly "suppressed" art forms might be makeup art, the art of the stunt man, set construction, backdrop painting, cinematograghy, heck even acting could be listed here. Will CGI be escorting some or all of these art forms down the same path as Silent Films, blacksmithing, and totem-pole carving?

Do you ever want to say "Hey this would be a lot better if it were done with [not CGI] instead"?

Thad:
There are many times as many people working in the FX field today as there were ten years ago. Now, it's true that some of the techniques are not as much in demand as they were, but it's not as bad as you might think. A company that we do quite a bit of collaborative work with is Illusion Arts, in Van Nuys California. The two founders, Bill Taylor and Syd Dutton, started doing practical camera effects and matte paintings, and built a very successful company around these kinds of classical techniques. Today, they are now doing synthetic 3D camera moves and painting on Macs; but 90% of the talents and skills they used before are still applicable today; just the medium is different. What makes a good artist is foremost their eye; their ability to see what is right and to see how to fix what is wrong. Illusion Arts was the lead shop in The Fast and The Furious, and along with us and Digiscope made a very modern movie.

In your example of puppetry, I too was a little disappointed to see the CG Yoda; especially in the closeups it just wasn't exactly the same. Of course, there's no way that a puppet could have done the lightsaber battle. Also, a growing area of FX is performance capture; recording data in real-time and applying it to CG characters. In Episode One and Two of the Star Wars movies, there is a tremendous amount of motion capture, used to animate robots and creatures. Performance capture is just puppetry with one's whole body, really.

Back in 1989, Graham Walters and I build the CG puppet Waldo C. Graphic for The Jim Henson Hour. The puppet was animated by putting one's hand into a 'waldo' (a mechanical tracking device reminiscent of a Luxo Lamp), and moving it around; and watching the results on a TV screen. This was so similar to the way that the Henson puppeteers usually work that it took no time at all to get comfortable with the puppet; I don't think it took Henson himself more than about 5 seconds to get totally up to speed on it.

Speaking about stunt work, one of the very first things that people realized with digital techniques is that 'wire-removal' is fairly straightforward. One can identify a moving wire in a scene and use several techniques to get rid of it. This meant that whereas stunt people used to use the thinnest possible safety wires, or none at all; now they could use systems with significant margins of safety. Also, face-replacement techniques coming to the fore means that stunt people can play far closer to the camera than they used to, opening up new opportunities for stunts.

When it comes to acting, though, I don't think that digital graphics will ever replace traditional techniques. There's no good reason to attempt it, and it's unbelievably hard. The subtlety and complexity of motion of skilled human actors is astonishing, and a ridiculous portion of the human brain is dedicated to interpreting those expressions and motions.

So, I would say that for every job lost, many are created -- and the people whose jobs are lost can often put those same skills to use in this new digital world.

Little studios vs Big Studios
by Milinar
I've followed your company's work over the past few years with great interest. It seems to me that the effects you do are pretty much on par with big studios like digital domain, etc. Have you purposefully stayed a small studio, with a few dedicated individuals? And what advantages has that given you?

Thad:
When we started Hammerhead, we made a deliberate commitment to stay small. We didn't see significant economies of scale in the field, and it seemed like we'd have much more fun in a smaller company. There is a strong culture in American business that you have to "grow or die", but it was our experience that growth was extremely difficult to manage and that companies that grew quickly found themselves dying quickly, too. Once you get past a couple of dozen people, there seems to be a phase change in company culture, and productivity declines.

We do find that our small ('boutique' is the term of art) studio can compete against companies one or two orders of magnitude larger than us on many jobs that don't require a huge volume of shots. While our staff is small, we are extremely experienced, having been doing digital visual effects since we helped create the field at the beginning of the 90's. We tend to hire very capable, experienced artists -- one way that we keep it interesting for them is that they are given a huge amount of creative control over their shots.

As a small company we can be very flexible, too. We can reconfigure ourselves for whatever project is at hand; and become the Deep Blue Sea company when that is what is going on. There is very little overhead not contributing to getting a particular job done. Paradoxically, in a small company you can do more different things. We've done FX for films, wrote and produced a big Hollywood film, made our own low-budget horror film, and wrote and sold software. We will very likely be making a couple of TV pilots next year of shows with substantial visual effects content. Bigger FX companies have to be more focused, they can't afford to be experimental and possibly make mistakes, because they would be much larger mistakes.

Our biggest weakness is that we cannot even begin to take on huge jobs. Movies like Pearl Harbor or Spiderman require hundreds of people; and we have to leave these jobs to the ILMs and Sonys of the world. Still, there are hundreds of movies a year with a few dozen to a hundred and fifty shots, with reasonable time schedules, where we can compete well. I think that we have found a 'sweet spot', where many features combine to make a pleasant, profitable, successful company -- and the small size is an important part of that.

Dropped crusade against Pixar patent?
by Anonymous Coward
I heard a rumor that you dropped your "crusade" against Pixar's software patent on deep-shadow technology? The rumor implied you were "bought-out"? Care to comment/share your thoughts on software patents in the VFX industry?

Thad:
While this was not moderated up, I do feel it needs an answer. The patent that is referred to is for the obvious enhancement of Lance Williams' 1978 z-buffer shadow scheme [pdf link] given that today's computers have more than 64 Kb of memory. In the Williams algorithm the scene is rendered from the point of view of the light, and the depth to the first surface is stored. Then, when rendering the image from the camera's point of view, you can easily tell whether a surface should be in shadow or not. The Deep Shadow Map idea was to store a function of depth vs. opacity at each pixel in the image rendered from the light POV, to allow partially transparent surfaces and subpixel shadow coverage.

Unfortunately, Pixar has decided to patent this. They presented the idea at Siggraph '00 but didn't mention in the paper the fact that they'd filed a patent; although word got out pretty soon. As the patent has not been granted yet, and they filed the patent before the Patent Office's policy change that now publishes patent applications, it's unknown what their claims are. What I am fairly sure of, though, is that Pixar didn't invent this technology, and that people at Pixar know this. So, it's not only really nasty to try to build on somebody else's technique and wrest it for yourself, but there may be legal problems as well.

I've discussed this with lawyers, and they say that the time to fight a patent is after it grants. While that seem weird and suboptimal, there's nothing about patent law that isn't weird and suboptimal. So, I'm going to wait and see what happens. There are other possibilities for fighting the patent that don't make sense to reveal at this time, for obvious reasons. Clearly this comment reveals that there is no agreement between Pixar and me to remain quiet on this issue.

It wouldn't surprise me if patents destroy the visual effects industry as we know it today. Pixar already has one notch in its belt, last week forcing the company ExLuna to withdraw its Entropy renderer that competed with Pixar's Renderman (and the shareware BMRT program that preceded Entropy, as well). A rational, cold-blooded analysis of the software patent situation would reveal that almost every complex program today could be attacked on patent grounds, as we've seen recently with the JPEG fiasco. Back when I worked at PDI, we were attacked a couple of times for patent violations, only escaping a devastating patent by NYIT on the thinnest of technicalities. In irony not lost on anybody, Ed Catmull of Pixar (with Disney's lawyers help) led the fight against NYIT's patent.

Interestingly, this has happened before in visual effects. Back in the bad old days, every single analog visual effects technology was patented and owned by the studios. Rear Projection, Front Projection, Blue Screens, Sodium Screens -- everything. The studios would in effect pool the patents between themselves; but if you wanted to make a visual effects film you had to do it completely within the studio system. It might happen again.

Comments

Re:seriously, we don't care...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite. I see the, "And how much is your soul worth, to work for the guys that are trying to ruin freedoms in America?" question wasn't asked (or answered, even though the "Are you a sell-out?" question was).

"Are you sure you want to?"

[DoctorNathaniel]

Well, my first sincere, if unhelpful answer is "Are you sure that you want to?" It isn't really an industry in the traditional sense -- there is little or no job security, there are long hours typically with no overtime paid, the stress can be extreme and the rewards are not great. There are almost no rational reasons to choose CG visual effects as a career.

Boy, that sounds just like every other job I've ever heard of that sounded like it was worth doing. --Nathaniel, the particle physicist with low pay, long hours, and occasional high stress, not to mention occasional high rad count

Re:"Are you sure you want to?"

[hillct]

So it's a cliche, but work should be it's own reward. This is not to say 'You should be thankful you have a job at all' but rather, if you don't enjoy the work you're doing, go find something you do enjoy. Grantes this isn't the best economy in which to follow such advice, but still, It's nice to see a few people who have found jobs that they truly enjoy and pursue that work regardless of how limited the other benefits are.

--CTH

Re:"Are you sure you want to?"

[Animats]

Hollywood has two modes. Either the project is in development, in which case there's no money but too many meetings. Or the project is in production, in which case there's money, but no time.

Some people like this, and some people don't.

Re:"Are you sure you want to?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as an ex-particle physicist:

I got out just because the job wasn't worth doing anymore ... there are only a handful of really novel ideas floating around and more than enough folks to do them. There are other fields where having a grasp of group theory, computation and measurement are useful. I mean, how worthwhile is it to decrease the uncertainty on a CKM element a few percent? I've always had the feeling that people in particles feel they have to justify the job by making it seem harder than it is. Yeah, when beam time is coming it sucks, when you get paged at 04:45 to because the DAQ crashed it sucks, but it's not fundamentally hard.

AC

P.S. What's up with the "occasional high rad count"? If it's really high, then call it vacation time. Did you really try to keep it ALARA?

Re:"Are you sure you want to?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually. I am a Cg artist who makes a ton of money. Has a great work schedule and would never want to anything else with my time besides spend it with my beautiful family which I have plenty of time to do because of this career. And yes, I have been worried about losing my job...... for the past 8 years. That's not so bad.

Re:"Are you sure you want to?"

[NorthDude]

Are you doing CG Porn?
;-)

Re:"Are you sure you want to?"

[DoctorNathaniel]

First, I do tend to agree with you, to some extent: particle physics needs to reinvent itself, and soon.. it's getting bogged down. I'm personally in one of the more dynamic areas: neutrino physics, which for the last 10 or 20 years has been driven primarily by experiment, not theory, and so has been a nice place to be. It's now starting to move in the direction of 'precision' science, rather than discovery, but that may change again

And, OK, I was lying about the rad count. I'm a _neutrino_ physicist, after all. But I think I once inhaled some 57Co.. does that count?

---N

Re:"Are you sure you want to?"

[Whoop-D]

Yeah, while I know (in an online sense) Thad and agree with many of his insights, I'd have to say that there are many caveats with his statement on how "rough" it is as a CG artist.

I knew I wanted to do this since I was about fifteen and made it happen, though my own work and a little luck. I can't imagine doing anything else for a "job". But, all humility aside, I'm pretty good at what I do. The people who are good at what they do in this industry aren't wanting. I've never had to go "looking" for a job.

I'm eating balogna sandwiches while making my own indie film right now but I feel very secure in the knowledge that if things don't work out I can literally pick up the phone and be back in business. Gimme a couple days and I can work anywhere I want in the civilized world (and a few uncivilized places too).

What the industry doesn't need is more wannabes and folks that can't pull their own weight. There's stress (moreso for folks like Thad that have to wear the entrepreneur hat as well as FX artist), and there are many headaches in your future if you choose to accept this mission, but there are many rewards.

Showgirls was nothing.

[Elwood P Dowd]

You should see the special effects I did in Citizen Kane. For example, Mickey Rooney played the part of Citizen Kane. Orson Wells was disappointed with the outcome, so we had to replace Rooney with bluescreen shots of Wells for the entire movie.

Wells like Rooney's costumes better, though, so we had to modify Rooney's costumes digitally so that they would look like they fit a man of Orson's... "stature."

Re:Showgirls was nothing.

[ianscot]

For its time, Kane is actually heavy in special effects. Practically every shot has some combination of miniatures, paintings, and all that classic stuff, leaving alone the sound work. Some of the commentary tracks on the DVD describe them.

Yeah, I know you were joking, but Kane's a perfect example of the unnoticed special effects thing he's talking about, it really is.

Re:Showgirls was nothing.

[Elwood P Dowd]

For its time, Kane is actually heavy in special effects. Practically every shot has some combination of miniatures, paintings, and all that classic stuff, leaving alone the sound work. Some of the commentary tracks on the DVD describe them.

Yeah, I know you were joking, but Kane's a perfect example of the unnoticed special effects thing he's talking about, it really is.

Yeah, I know. The joke is funny because I made up special effects that were not used, even though the movie is well known to be SF heavy.

I guess it would have worked better if I said that Mark Hamill had Mickey Rooney stand in for him in all his lightsaber battles.

Whenever they talk about special effects that aren't noticed, it's like in Amelie with the inserted blue lamp. Of *course* we didn't notice the *&^%ing blue lamp. It's a *lamp*. It was in the portion of the frame that was furthest from the action. They could have had a two year old draw it in with MS Paint and we still wouldn't have noticed the *&^%ing effect.

Well if FX is so good ...

[hrieke]

These days almost every film has FX shots that nobody could possibly see. Our first film was 'Showgirls', and I defy anybody to find the dozen shots we did in that movie -- they are not in-your-face effects.

That explains why I thought all of the boobs looked fake...

Re:Well if FX is so good ...

[curunir]

but wouldn't that make the effects of the in-your-face variety?

Re:Well if FX is so good ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Our first film was 'Showgirls', and I defy anybody to find the dozen shots we did in that movie

Man, I just hope they don't tell me my boner was simulated. That would be traumatic.

Showgirls effects

[Van Halen]

VH1 has been playing Showgirls a lot lately and my wife and I were somewhat amused to watch it and look for all the drawn in lingerie that stands out like a sore thumb (I haven't seen the unedited version but from what I hear, it must have been a lot of work to make this suitable for regular TV). I assume these are not the effects mentioned in the article. ;-)

I'm curious to know what kind of effects a movie like this might normally have (maybe not examples from Showgirls per se, as you challenge us to find them ourselves, but any other examples?). It's interesting to find out what kind of work goes into movies that you don't necessarily even notice, precisely for the fact that it's good and does its job by getting out of the way. What have we (the collective whole of moviegoers) been missing and under-appreciating?

Re:Showgirls effects

[Anonymous Coward]

Hollywood special effects include:

• The ability to get Slashdotters to post 500+ comments expressing their rage at "the MPAA is shafting you" stories, while in another article appreciating the people who actually make the business work -- people like Beier.

I'm sure Shipman (UK) was quite a good doctor, too, before he started on his mass killing spree. And yes, before the screams of "hyperbole!", restricting freedom ultimately means death.

I suggest all Slashdotters with any concern for freedom request that the editors cut down on the hypocrisy inherent in the love-hate relationship with things Hollywood.

Re:Showgirls effects

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf? I know now why I read at 0... the above post was nowhere near a troll. It merely stated an opinion on working for the MPAA, just as one might criticise someone who decides to work at Microsoft, regardless of their technical skills. What is the problem?

Re:Showgirls effects

[daeley]

We have beautiful sunsets in Southern California. Some of the most spectacular ones are due to smog.

Should we continue trying to reduce smog? Of course.

Does that make the sunsets not beautiful? No.

Only zealots cannot separate these two concepts.

Re:Showgirls effects

[Apostata]

A lot of effects are done to correct mistakes during production: boom microphones hanging from the top of the screen, tattoos, better clouds, bluer water...it's corrective and not necessarily "on display" by nature.

Re:Showgirls effects

[jafac]

Living a bit farther north of So Cal, we don't really have very spectacular sunsets (at least not compared to say, Phoenix, which is partially from the smog, but a great deal just due to dust).

Personally, I'd rather *not* have pretty sunsets, if it meant that I wouldn't have to deal with smog. When I drive down to LA, as soon as I get past Thousand Oaks, my eyes start to burn. Can't imagine living there.

Re:Showgirls effects

[Eimi Metamorphoumai]

IIRC, the DVD of Contact has a commentary track by the lead special effects person. It's full of things like day-for-night shooting, compositing tv and computer monitors into the final shot, places where the camera angles weren't quite right (there's a scene with Jodie Foster driving where you can see her face in the rear view mirror; it was cheaper to add that later than to futz around with the camera angles wasting actress time). Some interesting stuff (though it doesn't necessarily make the movie worth watching again)

Re:Number of questions incorrect... - correction

[sQuirlbuz]

10+ is 10+ something (as in more than 10) 10++ is 11.

Re:so, Beier got his foot in the door through porn

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure he is really hurt by your biting analysis. Maybe it will make him quit his high-paying Hollywood job and become unemployed, like yourself.

Best Price

[Mr. Sketch]

It's interesting that people talk about how much cheaper Linux PCs are compared to SGI machines (say), but truly both machines have almost the same cost (zero) compared to the cost of the animator who is using the machine. The choice of workstation should be entirely based on what makes the artist most productive.

This couldn't be more true. It's pointless to argue over a few hundred dollars (or maybe 1 or 2 thousand) additional cost for a computer when you're having to pay the person using that computer about that every few weeks. The artists/programmers should get whatever tools would best help them accomplish their task (within reason of course).

Mod me as troll/flamebait if you wish, but it's true and I'm glad Thad pointed that out. I don't want to get into a TCO battle, because I'm an avid Linux user too, but his point his sound and I just wanted to highlight it.

Re:Best Price

[DearSlashdot]

Actually, this can be seen as a big plus for Linux. Think about it -- studios use Linux not because it's cheaper, but because it's better regardless of price. It is a TCO battle, but TCO should include the productivity of the user, which, in this case, outweighs most other considerations.

This is the kind of thing that can help pull Linux out of any (mistaken) bargain-bin credibility problems.

Re:Best Price

[x mani x]

On the desktop I agree with you, but in the server room I do not. The cost difference between 20 racks of P4's and 10 Origin2000's is extraordinary (in the millions), whereas the difference between a dozen Wintel workstations and a dozen Octane2's is not (in the tens of thousands). On top of this, the rendering performed by the servers does not require much human interaction and the software is probably the same on both types of hardware. Not so for workstations.

Re:Best Price

[ceswiedler]

Price isn't everything. From what I've understood of big FX companies switching to Linux (for workstations) was that they were interesting in having total control over the system. Most of the big houses have their own proprietary software to augment Maya, etc. Being able to modify the OS (right down to the kernel) to fit the application they developed was the most important feature of Linux.

Re:Best Price

[marauder404]

I totally agree with you. You can't just look at the bottom line cost in dollars. If the SGI has better tools and can save the artist's time, it's worth a certain premium (depends on how valuable the artist's time i). TCO includes ALL kinds of costs, not just monetary: cost of budget, schedule, administration, learning curve, personnel training, etc. If you can save 50 hours of artist's time at $100/hour, you saved $5,000, which could justify the extra cost of the SGI machine vs a Linux machine. Not only that, but you've left yourself room for error and revision.

Re:Best Price

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a personal gripe with me. Developers understand it. I wish more companies would understand this.

My company hired 3 CG developers (including me) and several artists for a few years, telling us they would give us excellent rendering hardware, and spending quite a bit on salaries, etc. After over a year of developing to a spec of multi-CPU, high-end machines, we get a new spec...

A developer's AMD 1700+ will have a GeForce 4 MX(!!!) put in (replacing the much better GeForce3) for the final interactive rendering system.

Technology costs are NOTHING compared with the costs in salary.

Re:Best Price

[the gnat]

I'm actually in a situation where Origin 300 may be the most cost-effective solution. With educational discounts, we may be able to buy these boxes for about $25,000 per 4 processors (with 2GB memory). Considering we can then scale it to 32 procs by linking nodes together, this is not at all a bad deal. And the effective bandwidth on a PC is nothing like on an Origin.

Re:Best Price

[Anonymous Coward]

And the effective bandwidth on a PC is nothing like on an Origin

Very true. People keep fogetting about bandwidth when talking about clusters. I admin a number crunching cluster of 70 Intel linux boxes, and we are seriously considering getting an Origin to replace them, simplt because of bandwidth.
Basically for every minute the CPU crunches number it spend 4-10 minutes dealing with IO and sending big files back and worth to the server. If we replaced this with a 16CPU box connected directly to a fibrechannle RAID then IO would drop to close to zero and total efficiency would go up.

Re:so, Beier got his foot in the door through porn

[Anonymous Coward]

having a bad day at work or something? You're trying so hard to be critical and argumentative, but just come across as a bratty prick.

Snow Crash -- The Movie

[Otter]

Excellent interview -- thanks, Thad, Roblimo and all the questioners and moderators!

A good book has such scope and detail that it's hard to distill it into a reasonable-length movie. While I'd love to see a movie made from Stephenson's 'Snowcrash', any reasonable length movie would have to leave out at least half of the stuff that makes the book great.

I dunno about that. So much of Stephenson's greatness is in the words. Would you pay to watch Randy Waterhouse eat a bowl of Cap'n Crunch? Just showing franchulates, Refus and Burbclaves wouldn't give any feeling about the transition from our society to that one, while when reading the book it seems entirely natural. Plus the virus/information/religion stuff would be hard to get across.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[dillon_rinker]

Would you pay to watch Randy Waterhouse eat a bowl of Cap'n Crunch

Would you pay to watch a valve in a submarine's nuclear reactor? Clancy spent something like a page and a half on this in "Hunt for Red October" and it was cool. It was not in the movie, but the movie was cool anyway.

As he mentions, novels are not really suitable fodder for two-hour movies; there is too much subtlety in them. The most you can hope to capture is the essence. It is rather like translating a calculus textbook into a pre-literate child's picture book.

I would pay to watch Randy's grandfather bicycle with Alan Turing and demonstrate his computing machine to the future head of the CIA.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[kremlan]

besides, who would play Raven?

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[BitHive]

Given the quality of the movies that have beenc oming out lately, I would NOT want to see Snow Crash - The Movie. In fact, the idea is almost insulting, and I pray that Stephenson would slam the door in the face of any studio that proposes it to him. Imagine the awful feeling you'd get after watching some braindead director's adaptation of the novel into a two hour film. You wouldn't be able to unwatch it, and you could never read the book again without thinking about the movie. Ugh.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[Breakfast Pants]

The Rock would play the raven. As an aside did anyone but me notice the incredibly shitty looking rock/scorpian combo thing in The Mummy Returns? It looked so out of place that I fucking laughed my ass off.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[sjbe]

OK, someone explain the popularity of this book to me. I'm serious. I read it a few years back and while it was a vaguely entertaining and had a few interesting ideas it didn't strike me as this masterpiece it keeps getting made out to be. To me it seemed to crib a lot from William Gibson with a slightly more polished feel. I do like some of Stephenson's work but Snow Crash just never impressed me much. What am I missing?

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[JudgeDredd]

You bet I would - I LOVE Cap'n Crunch!

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[stux]

Yep.

He just needs some long hair first :)

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[good-n-nappy]

Yeah, that was terrible. Although I have to admit it went pretty well with the rest of that piece of crap of a movie. Didn't they reuse that animation in Adam Sandler's Little Nicky?

Another of my favorite movie computer animations, was the plane at the end of Executive Decision. I swear I could have done something better with one of those 3D web plugins that were heavily used after 9/11.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[Otter]

Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?

Would you pay to watch a valve in a submarine's nuclear reactor? Clancy spent something like a page and a half on this in "Hunt for Red October" and it was cool. It was not in the movie, but the movie was cool anyway...The most you can hope to capture is the essence. It is rather like translating a calculus textbook into a pre-literate child's picture book.

That's my point. The _description_ of the cereal eating process is masterful. Putting that scene into a movie would be entirely pointless. If you strip Snow Crash, in particular, of its prose, what's left is no Hunt For Red October.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[kremlan]

eh... i don't think he's big enough, raven supposed enormous without being the really ripped sort. I dont think he could pull off the attitude either.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[BeagleBoi]

Personally I think Stephenson did a better job of ripping off Gibson than Gibson has been doing for quite a while.

Less cynically, I just enjoyed Snowcrash as a fun read. I haven't really seen anyone describe it as a masterpiece.

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[dillon_rinker]

Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?
I dunno...just stream of consciousness, really. I get your point, but in that particular book (Cryptonomicon), there's plenty that I think would make an interesting movie.

Snow Crash...been a couple of years since I read it, but I think you're probably right. The Diamond Age would be cool, though...

Re:Snow Crash -- The Movie

[bellings]

Would you pay to watch Randy Waterhouse eat a bowl of Cap'n Crunch?

Dude, Cap'n Crunch musta been a famous hacker back in the 70's! I bet he's in his 50's by now. There's no way I wanna see him eaten by anyone, much less a guy named Randy.

That's just gross.

At least one reason

[patrickoehlinger]

Remember, the choice of workstation should be entirely based on what makes the artist most productive.

Re:Number of questions incorrect... - correction#2

[Anonymous Coward]

he said "10+ plus"

i troll for your mom and cmdrtaco's sister, dirty whore

I don't know about you...

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Quote:

Two of our more recent films, 'The Fast and The Furious', and 'For Love of The Game' were praised in the Los Angeles Times and Variety as films with a refreshing lack of special effects.

Yeah, that whole Flying-Through-The-gas-pedal-and-into-the-engine shot in TF&TF was SO done on-set...

Re:I don't know about you...

[marauder404]

That's not a special effect, that's raw CG. You know it's CG when you watch it. It's not designed to make you think that it's something else in reality.

Re:so, Beier got his foot in the door through porn

[Anonymous Coward]

just come across as a bratty prick

Funny, I thought Slashdot was against the MPAA. This guy is nothing but a suck-up to Hollywood big business, with reasonable technical skill.

If you don't like my 30 second "analysis" -- if you want to call pasting 5 quotes to give an idea of my feelings an "analysis" -- then perhaps you should post a rebuttal more sophisticated than "bratty prick!"

New CGI Yoda

[3141]

New CGI Yoda

They animated Yoda with Perl??? You really CAN do anything with it.

(Yeah, yeah, I know)

Re:New CGI Yoda

[qslack]

More than one way to do it, there is.

Re:New CGI Yoda

[Flarelocke]

CGI stands for Computer Generated Image as well as Common Gateway Interface.

Of course, CGI != Perl. CGI is not a programming language or some weird acronym for perl. CGI is an interface; it's a way for information to get from the web server to the program.

Re:New CGI Yoda

[highlander123]

sarcasm as bait catches another troll.

Re:New CGI Yoda

[catch23]

I dont' think this is a troll... I'm sure tons of pointy haired people out there will immediately think CGI == perl.

Re:New CGI Yoda

[Anonymous Coward]

CGI stands for Computer Generated Image as well as Common Gateway Interface.

Dear Captain Oblivious,

Please read the enclosed link for enlightenment.

Your humble servant,
A.C.

Re:New CGI Yoda

[Anonymous Coward]

My oh my. You are a complete idiot aren't you.

Re:New CGI Yoda

[Tumbleweed]

Don't be foolish; clearly they used Python.

Re:New CGI Yoda

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the tables are turned, and the troller is the trolled!

The most important line for the /. crowd...

[Etcetera]

It's interesting that people talk about how much cheaper Linux PCs are compared to SGI machines (say), but truly both machines have almost the same cost (zero) compared to the cost of the animator who is using the machine. The choice of workstation should be entirely based on what makes the artist most productive.

Remember, folks: The point of the Computer is to allow the User to get his/her work done faster.

Unless you're a computer programmer, a computer is a tool. If you're a computer programmer, a computer is a meta-tool, but it's still a tool (think about your dev environment, even if it's home-made).

This is what (I think) Apple gets and Random Linux Distro X doesn't.

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[(void*)]

The saddest thing in the world is to hear someone use a perfectly good argument that is persuasive one way and use it to persuade people some orthogonal direction.

Everything you have said is TRUE. The computer is a tool and we should use the best tool for the job.

On the other hand, refining a tool to be better, stretching and subsuming the functionality of one tool into another is another skill-set that is worth every bit as much as getting the job done competently. Neither should be at the expense of the other.

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what (I think) Apple gets and Random Linux Distro X doesn't.

That must be why Apple is the dominant player in the PC marketplace.

What you (and probably Apple) don't seem to get is that there is a point where the cost of the tool and support of the tool nullifies the benefits. That is what Microsoft has always understood and why they are worried about Linux.

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[Anonymous Coward]

you're a tool

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[jafac]

Compare the tool: Hammer/Anvil to the tool: Hydraulic Press -
The task - shaping sheetmetal.

The Hammer and Anvil are VASTLY more flexible in many (but not all) ways, and require a MUCH more highly trained, talented, and skilled worker to operate, and MUCH more time to create the end product.

The Hydraulic Press is extremely more flexible in SOME ways, much less flexible in many others, and requires a person who can press a big red button (sometimes, not even that). It can create it's end product in about 2 seconds.

The best tool for the job depends on what you're making. If you're making 100,000 stamped car doors, then yes, the hydraulic press is probably ideal for you.
If you're making a replica of a 16th century spanish conquistador breastplate, then the hammer/anvil is the answer.

hands down, the deciding factor is "best tool for the job".

Here, you have the comparison of two tools, I think it's a pretty good analogy.

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[ftobin]

Remember, folks: The point of the Computer is to allow the User to get his/her work done faster.

Unless you're a computer programmer, a computer is a tool. If you're a computer programmer, a computer is a meta-tool, but it's still a tool (think about your dev environment, even if it's home-made).

I highly resent this sort of closed, simple-minded thinking, which refuses acknowledge that others might see much, much more potential. It is true that many people do look at a computer like a hammer, and nothing more. But that is not the only way to look at a computer, especially one hooked up to a network, never mind a global network.

Saying a computer is only a tool to allow the user to get his/her work done faster is like saying that speech is only a tool. Computers+networks increase human-to-human communication, which has a lot more implications than 'work'. It affects how open and free society is (due to the flow of information) and allows many more social connections, allowing previously distanced persons to collectively gather (Slashdot is a great example of this).

It might be possible to worm an argument to state that these qualities are still show a computer is merely a 'tool', but you're going to make it stretch far and thin. There comes a point where a user grows to see that computers+networks arne't so simple; this is probably when a user steps over the line into power-user territory.

Consider a point in time when there was no ability to write glyphs of any importance. At first, maybe people would start writing merely so that they could tabluate objects. This would be similar to using writing as a tool. However, once they figured out how to distribute writing (e.g., on paper), it opens up writing as a means to communicate with others in previously unconceived ways, which has enormous implications for society.

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[alicebotmaster]

I can't believe people are falling for this. He obviously didn't answer the questions. This was obviously a bot writing the answers. Now the bot is even writing his own questions too! I can't believe Slashdot is letting these people get away with this. When are they going to start making real human beings answer the questions. First Wallace, now this!

Dr. Rich

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[(void*)]

But MAKING NEW TOOLS is also a worthy activity. Say you are making an object with Hammer and Anvil, and someone wants you to make five more. Do you now start using the Hydraulic press? How about some kind of new tool that is slightly more efficient than a hammer and anvil, so that a modest increment in production is possible. The point is that while the deciding factor is finding the best tool for the job, jobs change, and tools can change too. That's what the flexibility of the computer is for.

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[Etcetera]

It might be possible to worm an argument to state that these qualities are still show a computer is merely a 'tool', but you're going to make it stretch far and thin. There comes a point where a user grows to see that computers+networks arne't so simple; this is probably when a user steps over the line into power-user territory.

tool - (n.) 2) a: something (as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession <a scholar's books are his tools>, b: a means to an end <a book's cover can be a marketing tool>

Except for those of us involved in the computer (ie, tool-making) industry, I still maintain that a computer is a "tool" in the classical sense for most users. Those of us steeped into the manipulation of computers to do our bidding (ie, computer programmers. ie, "the magic makers") see and use computers as tools with which to create other tools. We devise new methods of communication, which can bring about societal change, etc... but that doesn't affect how users perceive the system.

For the user, AIM and email are "tools" to communicate, much like the telephone. We may go on and on about data mining and information retrieval, but the User sees an interface to better understand the stock market (or something). Again, tools to accomplish a task.

It's only programmers and those involved in the industry created revolving around computers that wax poetic about the abilities of it. The vast majority of users don't.

And to explain my comment about Apple, anyone who's familiar with Apple over time realizes that what Apple is great at is slowly exposing the possibilities of the computer as a "meta tool" to the end user, without forcing them to take a CS class first. HyperCard (1987) and AppleScript (1993) are two examples of ways Apple users can begin to gradually design and impliment workflow solutions ("tools") customized to what they need. Anyone who's familiar with iMovie and Final Cut Pro will see workflow similarities there as well.

The problem with *nix is that in order to begin organizing and implimenting your own solution, you generally need to learn a programming language first. Not especially forgiving, and not accessible to the general user. *nix users (as opposed to sysadmins) who have lives outside of computers may not discover the use of the machine as a meta-tool as easily as Apple's seem to.

And Windows; how can you organize your own workflow when you're not even supposed to know understand your disk heirarchy?

Re:The most important line for the /. crowd...

[ftobin]

Except for those of us involved in the computer (ie, tool-making) industry, I still maintain that a computer is a "tool" in the classical sense for most users. Those of us steeped into the manipulation of computers to do our bidding (ie, computer programmers. ie, "the magic makers") see and use computers as tools with which to create other tools. We devise new methods of communication, which can bring about societal change, etc... but that doesn't affect how users perceive the system.

I can't disagree with these statements as much, because the meaning is quite different from the meaning and connotations of your first statement:

Remember, folks: The point of the Computer is to allow the User to get his/her work done faster.

As I stated, and you repeated in your followup, yes, for most people, it is nothing more. But I do believe there is a threshold that can be crossed where all of a sudden your view changes, and you see another world.

Books to movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of books to be made into movies. I've always wanted to see some brave director and some good actors make Stephen Donaldson's 'The Gap' series into a (doze or so :) movies. Uncut. Or as uncut as to avoid an X rating. That would rule so much, but will never happen, the story is much too violent and possibly disgusting to film. I mean, when bad ass unfeeling aliens who want to assimilate humanity are the most redeemable characters in a story mostly about humans, chances of a movie adaptation are pretty slim.

I'll settle for David Wingrove's 'Chung Kuo' series instead.

digital effects supressing other forms...

[fireduck]

Soon after Lord of the Rings was released, Cinefx (a journal dedicated to special effects in movies) had an issue entirely devoted to LOTR. What really suprised me, was how much of the movie was made conventionally. A large number of the landscape shots (Rivendell, Orthanc, etc.) were miniature sets that were created. As I recall, some of these miniatures were so large that they couldn't fit them inside a studio and required all sorts of special equipment to actually get the shots Jackson wanted (the camera panning up Orthanc was one such shot, IIRC).

As I was watching Attack of the Clones, I was struck with how fake everything looked. All of the setting seemed unreal (particularly the droid factory planet). I would imagine they were all created digitally. Contrast that with the beautiful and (IMO) realistic settings in LOTR and you can see that CGI effects, while nice, still aren't there entirely, yet.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[silverhalide]

As I was watching Attack of the Clones, I was struck with how fake everything looked. All of the setting seemed unreal (particularly the droid factory planet). I would imagine they were all created digitally. Contrast that with the beautiful and (IMO) realistic settings in LOTR and you can see that CGI effects, while nice, still aren't there entirely, yet.

I read an article on AOTC, and was not too surprised to find out that every single clone ever shown in the movie was computer animated. They never made a costume for them. Yes, even the scene where the clone rushes to help the princess, that was also computer animated.

On another note, I was surprised to hear a quote from the Men In Black (I think) directors that was something along the lines of, if they ever have the option between a CG shot and a regular live-action charicter (be it a puppet or human), they almost always go with the live action. They made a good point of the fact you can't really improv with CG at all.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[cmpalmer]

The shots of Naboo in Episode I really amazed me. I was really impressed that CGI techniques had improved so much. Then I saw a behind the scenes shot of an ILM tech standing inside astride the incredible miniature of the city. What really made the difference was using the CGI techniques to "touch up" the model -- adding moving trees, realistic water, people and vehicles.

The overhead shot of the Titanic was similar -- great ship model, CGI water and digitially composed passengers combined into a very realistic shot.

It's a long way from Logan's Run where a great miniature city was ruined by the scaling effect of the water. I understand that they used to use alcohol or other lower viscosity fluids, but it still never looked right.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[stevarooski]

I couldn't agree with you more. Menace and Clones looked like toy shows because all of the CG looked so shiny new. Nothing felt weathered or USED, which is in my opinion a key component of realistic effects.

Also contributing to the CG atmosphere is how despite some amazing recent advances (particularly in hair and shadowing), CG texturing still has serious problems looking organic. Likewise with animation. Not to knock some excellent efforts, but some recent examples are Harry Potter and Final Fantasy.

CG still has a long way to go before it can completely replace models, IMHO. And even longer before it replaces actors with any sort of believability.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[Dirtside]

A number of seemingly-CG shots in AOTC were actually not quite. For example, in the scene where Obi-Wan is being given the tour of the cloning facility, he's walking along with the Kaminoans down this long, curving hallway, looking out the windows at the clones being trained below. Naturally, when I saw the movie, I figured that the hallway background was itself CG, but it wasn't. It was a miniature. There were a number of other incidents like this, where things that were "obviously" CG, were, in fact, miniatures.

LOTR had a huge advantage in that almost all of its backgrounds were Earth-type areas. Hills, mountains, forests, plains, etc. almost all of which were found in New Zealand, allowing Peter Jackson to avoid having to use CG to construct them. Where is George Lucas gonna find a droid factory on Earth, or the giant (unearthly) rock formations on Tatooine or Geonosis, or the countless megaskyscrapers of Coruscant?

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[malducin]

Just a few points. That Cinefex issue covered also The Time Machine and Black hawk Down, besides LOTR.

You might also be surprised to hear that AOTC had one of the biggest model units ILM ever employed, I think 80 modelers at peak time. Geonosis was done in part with miniatures and also footage from the wastelands of Utah. While much of the droid factory was CG there were also plenty of miniatures used on those shots. The arena in itself was a huge miniature. While it fit inside the model shop it had to be sliced into wedges to be filmed which also allowed to have to untis shooting it at the same time.

To me it seem more of a perceptual thing, if you know or think to know something is CG you believe it looks fake. It's interesting to note that many don't do the comparison all the way, say with optical printing, static matte painting shots, stop motion and animatronics. I sure hope new generations of moviegoers accept CG just as old one accepted the old techniques.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[Mark Clements]

As I was watching Attack of the Clones, I was struck with how fake everything looked. All of the setting seemed unreal (particularly the droid factory planet). I would imagine they were all created digitally.

And you would imagine wrong. ILM created many a miniature for both PTM and AOTC. Here's a google cache of a page from VFXPro (I got a 404 trying for the real page). To quote from this page:

Miniatures were incorporated into digital environments throughout the film. "When you're working entirely in a computer generated environment, the possibility for where you can take the look is infinite," said Knoll. "Whereas when you're shooting with a miniature, because it is a real physical object, you have a grounding in reality." Snow's unit employed miniatures in the sequence that takes place in the Geonosian droid factory for just that reason.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[jafac]

My impression isn't that "CGI isn't there yet" - it's more like, Lucas was a cheap bastard and made a shoddy product.
Really, the CGI in EI and EII weren't even up to snuff with some of the things in Terminator II.

Although, in principle, I do agree that CGI isn't there yet - it's getting closer, but Lucas could have done MUCH better, and the difference is so great, I can't believe that it wasn't simply a cost-cutting measure.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[msim]

Where is George Lucas gonna find a droid factory on Earth, or the giant (unearthly) rock formations on Tatooine or Geonosis, or the countless megaskyscrapers of Coruscant?

He coulda gotten into cahoots with the Redmond giant, or worked some magic with Scott Sullivan,
They both seem good at making the impossible possible.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[Anonymous Coward]

And it also had the publisher's note about the magazine's redesign. Bla bla bla bla bla. It was a 56 page article on LOTR with the rest of the articles amounting to 34 pages, so it was almost a single-article issue.

Anyway it was a rockin' article. Buy the issue here.

Re:digital effects supressing other forms...

[pajor]

Remember that Attack of the Clones was done with digital cameras. Traditionally, internally lit models are "overexposed" to make the internal lights brighter. Since there's no film to over expose in digital, ILM had to ramp up the lights so much some models caught on fire.

ILM is trying to push the envelope and get some great technologies ready (by using some that aren't quite ready now like digital cameras), so I don't fault them too much for not using models for a lot of things.

Also, for not internally lit objects, ILM used a significant number of models, probably more than LotR, since LotR could mostly be shot on location.

Best quote

[wiredog]

there's nothing about patent law that isn't weird and suboptimal.

Re:Number of questions incorrect...

[Anonymous Coward]

stfu whore

CG is not the only answer...

[MahouButa]

"In your example of puppetry, I too was a little disappointed to see the CG Yoda; especially in the closeups it just wasn't exactly the same."

I agree with this completely. I mean, I'm sure I'm not the only one who was disappointed by the choice to render Yoda 24/7 in CG. It would have been fine in the fight scene (unless you have an invisible, acrobatic puppeteer), but in other scenes he didn't look believable. And I say that about a film in which almost every background and object was computer generated.

But something I don't see Mr. Beier mention is the general drop in CG quality in recent films IMO. Mummy 2, Scorpion King, and even Spiderman had some horrible shots. With budgets soaring into the scores of millions you have to ask, where the hell is the money going?

-MB-

Re:CG is not the only answer...

[idontneedanickname]

"but in other scenes he didn't look believable" not if you watched a cam... not seeing all the detail does help sometimes :)

Re:CG is not the only answer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that much money is going on effects per shot - i.e. everyone assumes that once it's been done once, it's easy to do again and again, in bulk (watch out for sub-Perfect Storm cg water coming in a million films soon!)

Spiderman and others (AOTC etc) suffer because the artists aren't getting to spend enough time on a shot, it gets a "could-be-better but you'd better move on" and never gets worked on again. It sucks, but there's nothing you can do about it, producers only schedule so much time for work that really needs a lot more refining.

Re:CG is not the only answer...

[Whoop-D]

The CG quality of recent films has NOT dropped. What has increased is the number of marginal films with CG quality that's reflective of their budgets getting sometimes twice the film budget for marketing, making them appear to be bigger films. Overall, quality has increased. Compare "Mummy 2", weak as it was, to the "Mortal Kombat" films some years back.

Almost every film will have its stronger and weaker shots. The same year some of these stinkers came out you also had "Pearl Harbor", which had some of the most transparently created digital effects shots in recent memory. Say what you like about the film (I've already said it all I'm sure) but the FX were as close to perfect as anything I've ever seen. It should have taken home the Oscar.

Where is the money going? Actors. One headline actor will get usually twice to three times the entire FX budget for a big Hollywood film. Most of a film's budget, more than 50% and sometimes approaching 80%, is spent "above the line". That means the principle cast, director, producer, etc. FX, crew and all of post-production is "below the line". And most big films spend more on marketing, sometimes much more, than above and below combined.

Reality vs. photo-reality

[dillon_rinker]

In any real-world photograph, the stars are invisible, they are far far darker than anything else in the scene

But in most any real-world experience that takes place outside after dark, the stars ARE visible. A camera is not as flexible as a human eye. Directors doesn't want the FX to simulate photography; they want it to simulate reality (or at least some verisimilitude of reality).

AI digital characters?

[poojyum]

hello thad,

do u foresee a day when you have digital actors that use AI/neural networks/fuzzy logic etc to take commands and perform for directors?

the work of natural motion (http://www.natural motion.com) seems heading in that direction!.

Re:AI digital characters?

[Bazzargh]

Hey I know that guy!

I was at one of the developers houses last new year, saw the stuff they were working on. Very cool, but er, not exactly Laurence Olivier.

At that time they basically had a box with legs that simulated walking on various surfaces, but it was 'real' physics and 'real' neural net tech letting it walk over obstacles, on hills, on ice; he talked about using it for crowd scenes.

-Baz

Re:AI digital characters?

[Whoop-D]

I'm sure Thad will have his own comments. But I'll say "no". There's nothing that's been done to date to suggest that it's possible in the near future. Nothing.

The best contemporary examples, and I think, best uses for a synthespian, is where a real actor would be in danger. Head replacement on stunt doubles ("XXX" has some incredible work from DD on this score) or fully digital stunt doubles will see the most dividends from work heading towards more and more realistic humans.

But synthetic actors for the sake of not using humans, and in a way that's totally convincing? Not in our lifetime.

Re:Thad, you are a fucking sell-out to MPAA

[Anonymous Coward]

dont bother, dude.. the editors will mod down your post anyway

WTF happend to Exluna?

[captaineo]

Does anyone have the real info on Exluna? I see now that they've discontinued Entropy and BMRT, but I thought that was mostly because of being purchased by NVIDIA. (my hunch is these products will reappear in the near future as the first hardware-accelerated Renderman renderers =)... But since the settlement with Pixar is secret, I guess we may never know?

Re:WTF happend to Exluna?

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard at SIGGRAPH that they were shut down because they had cut and pasted major portions of RenderMan code into their own products. Dunno if it's true...

Re:WTF happend to Exluna?

[bigjocker]

I just checked and found this on the BMRT home:

To our valued Customers:

You have probably seen the latest news announcing the acquisition of Exluna by NVIDIA and the settlement between Exluna and Pixar.

BMRT(TM) will no longer be distributed by Exluna or NVIDIA

also, there is a link to the settlement between Pixar and Exluna:

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945553.html

I use BMRT on a daily basis at home ... it's a very sad thing to find this out ...

Re:WTF happend to Exluna?

[captaineo]

That may have been Pixar propaganda =). I saw Larry Gritz a few times at SIGGRAPH; he seemed to be in good spirits. (Larry was the main developer of Entropy, after creating BMRT). He certainly didn't act like someone had just taken his livelihood out from under him...

The sad part is that Pixar could probably hit a lot more renderers. Deep shadow maps aren't widely used yet, but jittered sampling (another Pixar patent) is... (this may be why the "jittered antialiasing" setting in Lightwave is still a "secret" feature =).

Re:WTF happend to Exluna?

[Pseudonym]

The claim from Pixar included copyright, trade secret and patent violations.

The patent which Pixar claims that ExLuna violated is basically a couple of traditional Monte Carlo integration variance reduction strategies applied to pixel filtering, which many in the industry believe to be a completely bogus patent. (Much like the rest of Pixar's patent portfolio, in fact, possibly excluding patents relating the CHAP processor. I digress.) Larry deliberately removed this from BMRT (which did once support stochastic sampling) and Entropy was deliberately built on a different scheme. ExLuna did apply for patents on their technology precisely because they thought something like this might happen. High-end modelling and rendering is an area where the "big boys" have a lot of patents, something which the "little boys" (like Hammerhead and also my former employers, Dot C) are constantly angry about.

As an aside, Aqsis, the pre-eminent open source RenderMan-based renderer (and probably the only free one left now that BMRT is dead in the water), uses N-rooks Monte Carlo sampling which, while not officially mentioned in the Pixar patent, and not used by Pixar as far as I know, could be considered "derivative work" if it ever came to court (depending on how nasty the patent holder's lawyers were). We don't need to be worried yet because Aqsis doesn't really compete in the same arena.

The trade secret and copyright violation charges are harder to deal with. The three main founders of ExLuna are ex-Pixar employees and all worked on PRMan in various capacities. Without seeing the source, and knowing exactly what the "trade secret" stuff is, there's no real way for an external observer to tell whether the claims have any merit or not.

Add to all of this that all of the features which were Entropy's strong points (combined ray tracing and scanline rendering, global illumination) are going into the next version of Pixar's renderer, due out later this year. I should add that competing with Entropy probably isn't the reason why the features are going in. More likely is that Pixar is trying to compete with Blue Sky Studios, whose in-house renderer (used on Ice Age) already has them. In the end, PRMan is designed for Pixar's needs first and the wider market second.

What I conclude from all this is that the answer one of the original questions, "How do I get into CGI?" must include the following maxim:

Never work for Pixar unless you plan to change fields as soon as you leave there.

Join the club...

[reaper20]

-- there is little or no job security, there are long hours typically with no overtime paid, the stress can be extreme and the rewards are not great.

You mean, just like the rest of us?

Re:Join the club...

[Whoop-D]

Actually, most every large facility and many medium sized facilities are paying overtime now. All the majors do, in some way.

Some might say this was necessary to avoid unionizing the industry. But artists are compensated better now than even three years ago, largely. Every facility will be different and have perks that other places don't.

Rewards are relative. I worked 6+months (based on my timecard) in about two to two and a half months on "X-Men" to turn Senator Kelly into a puddle of water. I lost weight. I gained weight. I'm sure I lost a few hairs and greyed a few others. But seeing the shot screen in the finals reel to applause was an incredible feeling. Seeing the film in a theatre and feeling the reaction of the audience was fantastic. It made it all worthwhile to me. And it will exist for as long as that film exists. Those are my pixels. I call that rewarding.

...and it makes me less stressful over the fact that my pixels in "Sim0ne" will live as long, lol.

Re:Number of questions incorrect... - correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, 10++ is 10. ++10 is 11 though.

Re:Number of questions incorrect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Read this post

KTHXBYE

Showtime, I bet

[A nonymous Coward]

He later mentions Showtime, so I suppose Showgirls may have been some kind of Freudian slip ... so to speak :-)

Re:Showtime, I bet

[Thagg]

No, it was Showgirls. We added some water to a fountain in the infamous pool scene, for example. The real fountain just spurted out little droplets; but they wanted it to be more of a flowing sheet of water, for continuity with later shots. We did some pretty fancy rig-removal (usually you can hide the flying-rig under clothes -- but not in this movie.) We also added some steam to some of the stage shows, and removed some blood (must have been the only time blood was removed from a Verhoven movie :)) from the fight scene. About 20 shots or so, in the end -- it was the show that got the company started.

thad

Re:Showtime, I bet

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not the only time blood was removed from a verhoeven movie-

we actually removed blood from Troopers- where dizzy is impaled by a bug. were it left in, it was a sure route to nc17.

ab

CG vs. Puppetry Yoda

[bujoojoo]

Cinefex #90 has the AotC writeup regarding this very topic. Well worth checking out.

Re:Number of questions incorrect... - correction

[Anonymous Coward]

10++: invalid lvalue in increment

bad analogy

[Damek]

You don't pay for sunsets, so there is not a direct relationship between enjoying a good sunset and encouraging (or discouraging) smog production. Smog is related to cars (etc.), and cars are also not related to sunsets, unles you use one to go driving to your favorite sunset-watching spot.

In movies, if we don't like the MPAA and what they are doing, we can't separate our visual effects addictions from the industry that makes them. Yes, I can enjoy a good visual effect, and I absolutely adore a good movie (which doesn't necessarily have good visual effects, of course), but since spending my money on them would encourage the behavior of the MPAA members, I've given it up.

Spending money on movies made by MPAA members is exactly the same as giving money to MPAA members.

Only addicts refuse to accept this concept.

Re:bad analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I used to tell people that I'm an aspiring animator, but now that you've shown me the light, I'll start saying I'm an aspiring MPAA member.

Re:bad analogy

[Damek]

You know, I used to tell people that I'm an aspiring animator, but now that you've shown me the light, I'll start saying I'm an aspiring MPAA member.

I'm confused. Are animators the "smog"? Or the "sunsets"? Or are they in fact neither, in which case you're supporting my point that the smog/sunset analogy is a bad one?

In any case, I'd gladly pay you for your animation (if it's something I want to see), but I won't pay the MPAA for your animation. Get it?

You're either for them or against them. There's no middle ground.

Re:bad analogy

[daeley]

It's a bad analogy if I don't agree with you, eh? Political zealotry and aesthetics don't mix, period. You can convolute the whole thing all you want, but it doesn't change that fact.

If one wants to protest the MPAA by not going to see movies, fine. But comparing something/somebody (Beier? Hollywood? MPAA? Editors?) to a mass-murderer, calling the editors hypocrites, and generally laying into people for not agreeing with the AC is zealotry, pure and simple. And no matter how righteous the cause, I won't buy into zealots that can't separate politics and aesthetics, who substitute intolerance for rationality.

You said yourself that you can appreciate a good visual effect, but that because you don't agree with the MPAA you won't go to movies. You have successfully made the separation. The editors have successfully made the separation. The AC cannot and won't tolerate anyone making the separation. In fact, he makes a call to people "with any concern for freedom." Freedom, of course, as long as one doesn't disagree with him. This is absolutism as its worst.

Political thought is a continuum, not a spectrum; the far left and the far right meet at totalitarianism and use the same methods to kill dissent. The AC uses the same extreme, Draconian thought that he decries. Is he justified? No.

Re:bad analogy

[Damek]

No, I don't agree with the AC post to which you were replying. But I don't agree with your sunset analogy, either. I was only replying to your sunset analogy. Sorry if I got carried way.

As for appreciating a good visual effect, I could appreciate it if I went to see it, but since I refuse to pay the MPAA, I don't see it, so I can't appreciate it...

Basically I agree with your entire post, but I still think your analogy is flawed and suggests, whether you intended it or not, that it's OK to watch movies even if you disagree with the business practices of the producers. And I think that's wrong. But maybe that's just me.

Re:bad analogy

[Daetrin]

You're either for them or against them. There's no middle ground

Well thank you Mr. Dubya

As for the rest of what you had to say, you seem to be agreeing with the original analogy, as far as the analogy goes. You can't stand the smog (MPAA) but you can appreciate the sunsets it produces (the work of FX animators.)

The one difference between the analogy and reality being that it is theoretically possible to have the good animation without the MPAA around to produce it.

Re:Number of questions incorrect... - correction

[Anonymous Coward]

actually 10++ is nothing, because 10 is immutable

Re:Number of questions incorrect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn.

Yeah you're fucking hilarious. Now shut the fuck up already, you whiny little twat.

"Simone" with Al Pacino Aug 16

[peter303]

Is about the consequences of a completely synthetic popular actress. Her creator Al Pacino tries to convince the world she's real, but just doesn't like to make personal appearances. Although this is "just a movie", the story is not out of question in the future.

Re:"Simone" with Al Pacino Aug 16

[palutke]

But 'Simone' is played by a real actress.

An actress pretending to be a CG pretending to be an actress. . . how avant garde.

Re:"Simone" with Al Pacino Aug 16

[Anonymous Coward]

For a while they weren't going to say whether she was a real actress or not, so people would be confused and not know if she was really good CG or really tacky bimbo .... but i guess they dropped that ridiculous notion a while back. Nice one.

Re:Number of questions incorrect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Man will you quit crying? You're taking this way too seriously. It's not an evaluation of you as a person. Of course, now that you're whining so much we're getting a real glimpse of that, too, and your karma for that is way below excellent.

I stand corrected

[A nonymous Coward]

And now I have a good excuse to go rent it :-)

The road to celebrity....

[Lancer]

Roblimo: we asked him to do the interview after reading many intelligent comments he's posted

I really need to start building up some karma now - how else will I become a /. rockstar? :)

Snow Crash has already been optioned by a studio

[Travelr9]

This happened back in 1996. It went through a development cycle, had a director attached, and there was even some conceptual art generated which garnered a story right here on Slashdot.

At present, it's going nowhere -- but I have no doubt that it will eventually emerge in movie form, just like other long-thought "unfilmable" books like _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_.

Read the details here:
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/snowc rash.ht ml

Invisible Effects (was Re:Showgirls effects)

[Stele]

Many movies are full of these 'invisible' effects. Some of my favorites use effects to help extend what the camera can do.

For example:
In Contact, there is a shot where the camera starts outside the house and moves into the house. Another shot tracks the young Ellie from the front as she runs down the hall, then somehow magically flips as she opens the bathroom cupboard door, as if we were seeing the whole shot from the reflection in the mirror. Another shot tracks Ellie into the VLA building and up the steps to look out the windows at the VLA. They weren't allowed to shoot in the VLA, so they had to transition from an outside shot of her opening the door and running inside to the rest of the shot with her running inside a set.

In Birdcage, the movie opens with the camera flying over the city, and in one continuous shot it flies down into the street, crosses the street, and goes into the front doors of a bar. (Cool effect, especially since I wrote the software they used to transition the shots.)

Forrest Gump is full of effects like these. The feather at the beginning is a "puppet" being performed against a blue screen, until it "lands" on Forrest's shoe, where it morphs (again, same software) into another feather that was against his shoe, but was painted out during part of the landing. Or the part where they transition from Lt. Dan's new titanium leg with a pan up showing the rest of his body. That and all of his leg-removal shots tricked people into thinking Gary Senise didn't really have legs.

Check out the scene in What Lies Beneath where Harrison Ford caries Michelle Pfeiffer into the bathroom and places her in the tub. The camera tracks them into the bathroom from behind, where you can see the tub, then pans over their heads and drops down BEHIND the tub where you can see him place her into the water from below, all in one continuous shot.

It is always fun to be surprised by these seamless, 'invisible' effects, that a surprising number of people never notice. It is embarassing to be sitting there going 'ohh, coool, did you see that?' and only get blank stares.

Star Wars was not in danger of being lost

[Anonymous Coward]

The first Star Wars film reportedly had deteriorated quite a bit before the Special Edition was created; as the dyes in the film don't have good long-term stability.

Wrong. With all due respect to Thad, he is not an expert in the photochemistry of film. The Star Wars original negative had experienced a 10% loss in saturation due to over-use in making new duplication elements. It was not decayed merely due to time, and the oft-quoted IMDb trivia comment about it being in its "final months" of usability is nonsense. Problems like the 10% loss can be solved without resorting to the kind of techniques they used in making the "special edition".

Film is a very durable medium; far more durable than any computer data storage yet invented. Many films have had new prints made from their original elements after a far longer time than the original Star Wars negative had been sitting around. The problem of long-term storage has already been solved. If you're really worried about it, you can make dye-transfer prints and silver-based separations, which do not decay. If cared for properly, film can last indefinitely.

Don't believe everything Rick McCallum says, or everything you read in IMDb trivia.

Re:Star Wars was not in danger of being lost

[Thagg]

I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing that out.

thad

Re:Star Wars was not in danger of being lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice job, moron. You may be right, but how about this?

wrong! wrong! wrong! wrong! wrong! wrong! wrong!

Try being nicer in the future. :)

Re:Star Wars was not in danger of being lost

[Anonymous Coward]

silver-based separations, which do not decay.

In emulation of your own outstanding social skills : Wrong.

Film does decay even if properly stored. If it's improperly stored, it's much, much worse. And an overwhelming amount of our film history is improperly stored.

From the horrifically flammable and dimensionally unstable nitrate-based stock used in the early days to the acetate-based safety stock used today, much of which is dying a slow death from "vinegar syndrome", the history of film is full of tragedies.

We won't even get into the expense and the physical fragility of a medium that's essentially just a thin layer of dried-up Jell-o on a strip of plastic.
The problem of long-term film storage has NOT been solved.

Don't believe everything you read on a film-fetish web site.

Re:Star Wars was not in danger of being lost

[KewlPC]

Actually, from what I've heard, the dye transfer process is thought to make film last for a very long time. Basically, if my understanding is correct, it puts each of the 3 dye layers (the emulsion in color film has three layers: one sensitive to red light, one for green, and one for blue) on separate pieces of film. There are several advantages to this, not the least of which is that if one of them fades, the whole movie isn't lost (though the colors would look off).

Like the guy's .sig said, don't believe everything Rick McCallum says, and almost never believe anything on IMDB.

Re:Star Wars was not in danger of being lost

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lasting for a long time" != "does not decay".

Dye transfer IS a lot more stable than chromogenic film, and as Mr. Tact stated above, b+w color separations will last even longer.

HOWEVER, all of these DO still decay.If they're not stored properly, they can decay in a shockingly brief time.

Making backups of film copies is very expensive, especially if any restoration work is needed.Prints cost many thousands of dollars.Then you're also looking at generation loss (each time you copy the film the image on the copy has degraded somewhat).

Making backups of digital copies is cheap by comparison, and a copy is just as good as the original.

Yes, don't believe everything you read on IMDB. Don't believe everything film snobs say, either.

Re:Star Wars was not in danger of being lost

[Whoop-D]

"Making backups of film copies is very expensive, especially if any restoration work is needed.Prints cost many thousands of dollars.Then you're also looking at generation loss (each time you copy the film the image on the copy has degraded somewhat).

Making backups of digital copies is cheap by comparison, and a copy is just as good as the original."


Digital copies to what? Tape? CD? DVD?

Digital tape decomposes much faster than proper film archival methods. CDs do too and so do DVDs. Many folks in the music industry had to wise up to the fact that DIGITAL as a savior was sold to them too early. Jeff Lynn nearly lost several tracks for his last ELO album because the digital tapes he'd recorded on but TEN YEARS ago were toast. He had one shot to get the tracks off of them before they were lost forever.

Also, the amount of data needed to store an entire film, digitally, at ARCHIVAL QUALITY (read 10bit log scan) would cost a mint. HDTV telecines is not, I repeat, not archival quality. Neither is an 8bit lut version of a film scanned at 2K.

Large capacity tapes aren't cheap. It would actually be more cost effective to back the film up onto hard drives and then store the drives. Most any other form of digital back up would be one, more or all of the following: slower, more expensive and much more prone to deterioration. All digital means are too new to really know longterm stability performance outside theory. They said CDs would last forever, remember? It was a lie.

Re:Snow Crash has already been optioned by a studi

[BitHive]

Yeah, but they did a good job with Fear and Loathing, IMHO. The point of my post was that I'd rather not take the chance that it ends up really crappy, like Sphere (not that the book was great, but the movie sucked ass).

On Siggraph recruiting

[voodoo1man]

"This year's conference took place last week, and all of the big companies demonstrated vigorous recruiting efforts."

"If the sparse show floor weren't enough to remind you of the weak economy, a visit to the SIGGRAPH career center showed board after board of resumes, with job opportunities only posted in one small corner of the room."

"The job board was dominated with resumes from job-seekers but there were very few postings of jobs. Definitely a low-demand, high-supply type of market."

Just to set the record straight about Thad's contradiction. The VFX/animation job market is really in the shitter right now, and no telling when it will pick up. Take his advise and go look for employment somewhere else, unless you really like Ramen noodles.

Bad Movie Physics

[peter]

Thad: Our charter is to create the sequence that the director of the film wants for his movie; that usually means building things that look and move like things do in real life. Often we would use real-world physics to do this. Typically, though, we take extremely simplified views of the real world to make the computations more simple, and to make them run faster.

However, movies typically include a bunch of made-up bullshit physics: cars explode on contact with anything, lead bullets flash when they hit things, everything in Armageddon, etc..

Are movie directors and other industry people generally aware of how bad physics in movies often is? If so, why do they allow the nonsense to continue? Who puts the bad physics into movies, and who tries to stop them/fix it?

How often, if ever, do you tell directors "That's not how things work".

Re:Bad Movie Physics

[Whoop-D]

The physics only look bad to the less than 1% of the audience that knows or cares anything about physics. Movies aren't reality, or, at least the ones where a question of FX physics would even come up likely aren't.

A more appropriate question would be, "are the physics portrayed in a particular film consistent with the tone of the film?" The zero-G explosions in "Star Wars" were absolutely appropriate. Would these same techniques be appropriate for "Pearl Harbor"? No. The film, more than Newton, should be taken into account.

You might make a suggestion like that to a director once. That things "don't work like that" is totally irrelevant. The director wants it. You do it. Or you find another job.

Vincent D'Onofrio!

[Anonymous Coward]

Vincent D'Onofrio!
yes? yes.
=timmy=

Re:so, Beier got his foot in the door through porn

[Thagg]

Responding to your points.

1) "I feel that the difference between 'scripting' and 'programming' is nonexistent" -- mhm, ASP coders say that too;

If this is a religious argument about different languages, then there is no point in commenting. Otherwise, though, I truly don't see a difference between a 40,000 line shader used in A Bug's Life and any other program. I don't see a difference between a 20,000 line set of MEL scripts used in Dinosaur to control and animate the beasts and any other program. These are complex, rich, hard to write, difficult to debug, state-of-the-art systems written by toolbuilders and used by artists.

2) "A consistent request from filmmakers is for 'something nobody has seen before'" -- you are in a maze of Hollywood films, all alike...

That was a joke. We speak of an imaginary box full of things that nobody has seen before, so whenever the director asks for that we can just pull one out of the box.

3) "It's a new, high-lvel (sic) language for writing shaders." -- I think someone needs a new high level spellchecker;

Guilty as charged.

4) "The job of a movie director is to harness the skills of hundreds of talented, unique, possibly difficult people to create his vision and tell his story." -- no;

Sorry, but this is correct. I've worked on dozens of movies with an equal number of directors, and that's the job. The studios (typically) hire the director for his vision, and he implements that vision by getting the most out of his assembled cast and crew. What can you think the job of the director is?

4) "There are almost no rational reasons to choose CG visual effects as a career." -- especially when someone as incompetent as this might be displaced by your application;

I assume that this is just a personal attack. Well, whatever.

5) "Our first film was 'Showgirls', and I defy anybody to find the dozen shots we did in that movie -- they are not in-your-face effects. Two of our more recent films, 'The Fast and The Furious', and 'For Love of The Game'" -- see subject line;
* "although I admit that 'Millenium' (sic), based on the book-length version of his short story"...

That's [sic], not (sic). Actually, I got my start by helping invent the field of digital visual effects, first at NYIT starting in '78 and then with PDI's film effects group starting in '89 with Solar Crisis and 70-odd other films. Hammerhead's first movie was . And I wish that Showgirls was porn, but about the least erotic film I've every seen.

Oh, and that's "Mr. Beier" to you.

thad

Hoppie?

[680x0]

Hi Thad,
I vaguely recall meeting you at JHU (Barton Hall, in the room with all the Tektronics graphics terminals) sometime in the mid-80's. Were you actually a grad student there, or just visiting?

And, you married Cathy G., right? (If so, how is she doing?)

Do you run into other JHU people? Remember Mike McKenna? I think he used to study with Prof. Rourke also.

Do you know

[Anonymous Coward]

I meet the CEO, owner of the company that won the academy award for the Lord of the Rings SFX. Does any one know these guys?

Motion Reality

Big Hollywood sucky-sucky, more like

[Anonymous Coward]

Folks, Thad's too nice to mention that the "big Hollywood movie" actually sucks the chrome off a fender. Slander, you say? I have proof! Do you wish to see a movie with "missing money shots"?! I thought not!

Well, at least it isn't The Master of Disguise. Ouch.

Reality does not exist

[kop]

Your eyes can never capture a forground object and the faraway stars in one look. Its your brain that combines these images into a memory.
Reality does not exist. Your reality lives in your brain only.
That is why we need creative people. They can make images that stick to fuzzy stuff like brain.