Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects

Posted by timothy on from the and-a-one-and-a-two-and-a dept.

Xoanon (from TheOneRing.net) writes "I was recently privileged enough to view a lecture by Milton Ngan. As far as IT stuff goes, Milton has a pretty good job. You see, he is the Digital Operations Manager at Weta Digital. He is basically the architect for all the technical side of things at Weta. Last night he came and gave a 1 hour lecture at Victoria University outlining the hurdles and obstacles that needed to be overcome to produce the stunning 3D graphics lying in each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The lecture itself was full of lots of facts about Weta, the IT side of things and it also included some very cool behind the scenes shots of The Two Towers. The following is a detailed report from the event, where Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations. There is also a TON of info in regards to the special effects process, and news about MASSIVE. Take a look."

6 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. 64-bit procs by Sgs-Cruz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What I find interesting is that they want to convert all those procs over to 64-bit... times must be good to afford that! (Of course they are, what am I talking about...) Still, I like the fact that they're all running linux (well 220 of 300 commodity-grade workstations are anyway... or something like that...), that's pretty cool. To weta: you guys rock. Just do a better job on the blue-screening of the ents next time :) :)

    --

    Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).

  2. Has a very small view of a "Large" operation by MerlynEmrys67 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I knew test managers for networking products that had this much equipment to regularly test new nics coming out...

    That said I know of people that have responsibilities for 1000's of workstations and compute farms with multiple hundered extra computers.

    Guess what WETA has sounds good, but it is hardly large when you are talking about enterprise computing

    --
    I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
    1. Re:Has a very small view of a "Large" operation by malducin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well for VFX houses it certainly a largish opertation. Considering many boutique studios (which do a lot of commercial and braocast stuff) might just be a couple dozen machines and people at the most. There are few companies out there with more capacity, like ILM, Imageworks, and a few more.

  3. Re:I wonder if they know by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Congratulations! You spotted one shot. Now go back and look for the 30+ shots you never even knew were there.

    --

    I write in my journal
  4. Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. by gwernol · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.

    Now that WETA is a large and sophisticated operation, I wonder what they will do once they've finished LoTR. There are only so many special/extended/director's cut DVDs they can release. A group of that size and experience is a major cost and a major opportunity to rival Industrial Light and Magic and other effects houses.

    Does anyone know if Jackson plans to keep WETA to himeself or if they are going to do work for other studios or film production companies? I've got to assume the later unless Jackson plans to only do effects-ladened films for the rest of his career.

    --
    Sailing over the event horizon
  5. Re:I wonder if they know by dswensen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, I'm no film geek, but I took that "fake" look to mean that it was a magic staff projecting magical illumination, not a MagLite.