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A Tour of Pixar
Jellybob writes "A little something for those of you who aren't happy with where you work: just go and work at Pixar." This is apparently part of the Finding Nemo hype machine; here's a BBC story talking about deploying metal detectors and night-vision goggles to stop people from camcording the movie.
"It's estimated we lose between $3bn (£1.8bn) and $4bn (£2.4bn) a year to this problem despite strong anti-piracy actions by the movie industry," said Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
I love these estimates. Where do they pull these numbers out of? Realistically, 95% of this figure is revenue they'd never have earned anyhow. People who are willing to pay to see a movie will not settle for a low res DivX viewing on their PC. I think the $3-4B figure is based on pirated DVDs, not camcorder captures available on the net. Even then, these figures would be based on selling a DVD at $20 a pop for each pirated one in countries where $20 is half a month's wages. You have to admit that $3 billion loss is far more impressive a figure than a more factual $150M loss since that's about what they swallow on a big budget movie flop. I'm not saying piracy does not exist but the scale of the problem is being way overstated.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
Places that work on top-secret military-related projects often times have "vaults" in which workers must complete projects without any real connection to the outside world (anything outside of the room). So, this means no Web, email, IRC, FTP, Instant Messaging, etc.
Perhaps if Pixar adopted something like this, and built a large room in which workers could work without contact with the outside world, their problems would be eliminated.
Of course, you would also need a security team set-up to monitor what employees are bringing home with them at night, as well as during their lunch breaks. It's very simple to fit something as small as a CD-R inside a coat pocket or similar clothing item. All you'd need is one mistake, and suddenly the newest Pixar film is released to the wild.
I feel, however, that these early releases don't really hurt the companies as much as they think they do. If anything, perhaps it generates more excitement about the film. Many people may not ever go see a film, but if they catch an early release of it, their minds may be changed.
Just some thoughts from a fellow industry insider (not Pixar, though).
When Pixar started in 1985, Greenberg says, it took 8 hours to render one frame (or 1/24th of a second) of computer animation. Now, it still takes 8 hours, because the artwork in each frame is far more complex.
Keep in mind that they don't render everything all at once! Any given frame is bound to be a composite of many different layers.
They'll break up a single element (say, one fish) into multiple passes for diffuse, specular, shadow, and who knows what else.
Then there's backgrounds, z-depth images, shadow maps, and about a bazillion other things that need to get rendered, too.
Then they have to render the composite image, which also takes an obscene amount of time if the composite is complex.
Not to mention all the test renders and placeholder renders before the final.
So this "eight hour" figure has got to be just a ballpark estimate for the public at large. It would be pretty difficult to figure out exactly how many hours of rendering time actually went into one completed frame.
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why show the movie to 3000 people? Limit the number of pre-release screenings and just release the movie when you schedule it to be released. Bruce Springsteen did not have a problem of his new album getting pirated. Why? He didn't sent it to anyone.
-Matt
I've never liked these behind the scenes looks at crazy hip work environments. I mean - the cool office with lots of toys didn't do any good for Ion Storm did it?
I wonder if Pixar will want talk about their offices if their latest movie tanks and stockholders are wonder what the hell their money is being spent on.
Also, in the article Pixar comes off sounding like Saturn or Lotus or something. Those places always kind of give me the creeps. I would half expect to show up for work and see everyone wearing blue reeboks, or drinking magic cool-aid or something.
I would take an old starwars puppet over a CG Jabba anyday.
I agree. Although you got to admit that the CG Yoda in AOTC was pretty impressive. There was only one point in the movie (and only after I had watched it a few times) were you able to "tell" he was CG.
I think the reason CG Yoda was more believeable over Jabba or Jar Jar, etc... was the fact that they tried to make him look and act like the Puppet Yoda and not a real live creature/character.
They are trying to overkill the CG characters giving them cartoon like motion for acting and speaking. (over exaggerate lip movements for syllables, etc...) My lips don't move that much when I speak, and neither do puppets.
Perhaps if they concentrate on making the CG characters look like puppets they may be more believable.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
How are they so horrible because they're self serving? You claim that Pixar's a suck-ass company, but I don't see any valid reason behind this, other than the fact that they don't give away all their (Rendarman) technology. If Pixar is so bad because they keep industry secrets to themselves, then almost every other company in the world must be "suck-ass" as well.
I'm sorry that Pixar's not an open source software company -- I kinda thought that they made movies or something.
Some of this I feel should be clarified.
Pixar is the Microsoft of the computer graphics world. They have created some good stuff, yes, but they have not given much of anything back and often hurt the field.
They have certainly NOT hurt the field of computer graphics. They have contributed quite a bit of research. They did pioneer the Renderman standard. It was one of the things that helped CG get off the ground back when it was starting to be put in movies, yet even SGI workstations only had 64 Megs of RAM. There are alot of Renderman renderers out there. The Exluna/Entropy thing is more complex because the Larry Gritz worked at Pixar. I feel their Lawsuit against the company was baseless, (entopy was a different kind of renderer) and their suit against him personally was pretty evil, but it had a small twist too it so it wasn't completely cut and dry.
Have you ever seen Pixar release anything like Massive (Weta)? I didn't think so.
Massive is being sold at $70,000. It is not owned by Weta as part of a deal with the creators. It's not really a good comparison. I think that Weta probably will release some of their smaller tools as open source projects once the dust settles and their pipeline solitifies as they even out and become a permanent and major visual effects studio. For now though, other studios have done more, like Rythm and Hues with Film Gimp.
Pixar has been a major catalyst in 3D animation, I think it would be unfair to say so just because they aren't releasing open source tools. And I think that also some top executive is a complete bastard for suing Exluna out of buisness, but that doesn't mean that the company is bad in general.
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