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New Lucas Headquarters To Open in San Francisco
Afroloop writes "This article (with pics) in the SFGate covers the opening of the new Lucas Headquarters in San Francisco's famous Presidio. It will house up to 1,500 employees by next fall. From the article: 'The Presidio will feature 600 miles of fiber-optic cable. 4,000 processors and 150 terabytes of storage -- massive computing power and speed, with the ability to work 10 times faster than they can today.'"
If you wanted to be optimistic, you could say that more power doesn't translate into more CG, but rather higher-quality CG.
(Plus, it's near-impossible to put more CG in his films anyway...)
. . . a terabyte just isn't as impressive as it used to be? After all, it is possible for a relatively green computer tech to go down to Best Buy and slap three 400MB drives into her rig (ahem...) and have a terabyte ready for whatever goodness she chooses to place there.
I know, I know, in three months, this will be quaint but it used to be - not so long ago - that a terabyte was this massive hill on the horizon. Now - well, not so much.
I thought the Presidio was supposed to be for non-profit organizations, like the Internet Archive.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
No, but they had the staff of Ra medallion, Threepios' Arm plus other props, a two story library complete with stained glass and a one-piece carved wood circular stairway... all in a beautiful victorian era mansion.
I mean, you KNOW Lucas made gajillions on Star Wars but you don't *KNOW* exactly what that means until you see what he did with it.
This is - of course - tres cool. I envy Lucas and his minions who are going to work there. I'd like to work in such a facility. Being a 3D Animator is hard work but I figure it would be very rewarding. Imagine something like "Yeah, I did the Shading on the Podrace" or "Yepp, T-Rex. He's mine." - Neat.
However, I think this is more of Lucas fullfilling his dreamstudio than something extremely future focused.
Movies and their making as we know it are about to go through radical changes. I even figure Lucas knows this, since he's actually partly lead the way.
Global viewing habbits and a big shift in the classical work and entertainment preferences ("work up the sweat at day, zero activity passive entertainment at night") will have todays movies decline in importance.
I actually expect Video Gaming (in it's broadest sense) to outrun moviemaking within an decade or two.
Just think of an ultra high resolution, lightweight tablet, wireless broadband everywhere and the promise of constant revenue streams for MMORPG providers. On the tram? Log in and re-outfit your character. In the car? Dial into the Chatroom and check with the Clan how things are going. That's not far away at all.
A game like World of Warcraft, Phantasy Star or Ragnarok is just to complicated for Grandma nowadays, because the AI avatars leading you on a tour through the virtual world aren't there yet. But they will come.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I know that the flag says "California Republic", but there was less than one month between Fremont's declaration of an independent California and Commodore Sloat's capture of Monterey, the capital of Alta California, and his claim of the territory for the US. It's very difficult to say that there was any independent California government in that intervening month or that it was a "California" military base in that intervening month.
Perhaps one day they'll come up with a way to fix one thing that's always bugged me about the Tattooine sequences in old and new SW movies:
Shadows.
On a planet with two suns, all shadows cast would look deicdedly different from what we're used to. Going by the two shots that show the suns, they appear to be (impossibly of course) in the area of 10 sun radii apart. This would produce two sharp, light shadows for each object, with a darker patch where both shadows intersect.
Because they were filmed in mono-sunned Tunisia, it would have been impossible to give the correct effect when filming the OT, and very difficult with the last 3 films. Even with current state-of-the art CG post-processing such a task would be very time-consuming, and would probably involve creating a 3D model of the objects and environment to get the shadow casting looking anywhere near realistic.
Of course some shots would need to remain unaltered for artistic reasons (for example the shadowed Padme/Anakin hug on the igloo wall in AOTC), but you could use the justification that this was late evening and one of the suns may have already set.
If done well, this would be one CG revision that I would welcome.
I can't believe I just typed this.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Letterman Digital Arts Center
Like the Marriott that competed for building there? Regardless of whether or not you like Star Wars, George has a real sense of architecture. The new buildings are beautiful, and match the 100+ year old facility perfectly. And yet they are totally state of the art, and have many green features. It could have been much worse.
The site is quite nice. I remember it being built when I worked at the Presidio Trust one summer. I went by a few weeks ago and it looks like they're ready to open it. It fits in quite well and looks much better than that old and ugly hospital building that once stood there. Hopefully they'll extend trolley buses into the park now that there'll be demand for them. Also, hopefully Lucas will provide some sort of a visitor center to attract people, considering the fact the Palace of Fine Arts, Exploratorium and the Golden Gate Bridge are a few steps away. BTW. Lucasfilm will get a much better view of the bridge once the new approaches get built in about 10-12 years.
-Palal