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Lucas's New HQ
pin_gween writes "The KS City Star reports George Lucas (of the "It's not about the money" fame) has opened a new headquarters for digital film works. The campus has, among several movie theaters, "data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports. Fiber-optics cables are connected to every artist desktop, allowing high-resolution images on each computer. In all, there are 600 miles of cable throughout the campus's four buildings." Not too shabby, or cheap."
"In terms of being a corporate executive, I'm pretty much tired," he said. "I'm going to focus on making movies."
Noooooooooooo......!
Now maybe he could make a movie worth watching. - And just watch the modders hit me on the head -
The Presidio facility has been open for a bit. Yes, it's sweet and one thing that can't be said about George is that he does thing half-assed.
Of course, the expectation is that you work INSANE hours. I only wish I could get this set up at home so I can balance my life a little better.
But on top of it he is trying to ridicule all us geeks with ungodly huge data pipes!
Apparently, Indy finds out that Dr. Belloq is really his father in a shocking scene.
Once he's tired of the location, the Federation can buy it, because it is located on the grounds of the future Star Fleet Headquaters.
then I could have high resolution images on each of my computers.
I'm fed up being stuck on 100Mbps' 640x480x8 !
lol, good grip on the technology there JUSTIN M. NORTON, any other great stories you have written ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is all fine and good, but it would sure be nice to spend some of that money on writing classes, or directing semminars.
Yes, all that technology is nice, but ultimately worthless, if the movies coming out of it have no substance.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I've talked to several people who have worked at ILM and currently are there. Sweatshop is a word that keeps poping up in the course of conversations. Hopefully this will change or has already changed.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports.
I think that means gigabits. Unless they started rating cards in bytes overnight.
Trolling is a art,
now that's Industrial .... Light .... and .... Magic ....
Get your Unix fortune now!
Is that what this huge dirt place is all about?
Maybe the pictures were actually captured a while back.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html#1
Grammatical error, not a typo.
I'm guessing a child of this will point out irony...
"The KS City Star reports George Lucas (of the "It's not about the money" fame) has opened a new headquarters"
And I have a pretty good idea of it's exact location.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
San Francisco gave him land for the studio in the Presidio, the most sought-after location in SF, which has among the priciest real estate in the country. If I were cutting that deal, I would have required Lucas to wire the entire park, and his IT staff to keep the network running, for every tenant, including public use. Now that would be News for Nerds.
--
make install -not war
should i post this on slashdot as well?
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
The paragraph submitted above for this article makes it seem like Lucas is hoarding all his money and somehow going against a cardinal rule of not making money. For one thing, non profit artists may seem romantic and all, but in truth we all want to get paid...and if what we do is make movies that cost millions of dollars, you better believe we want to get paid millions of dollars or more. Secondly, it's not like he's spending all his money on Bugatti's and trips to Bali...he's invested a large chunk into a creative complex where artists and movie-goers can benefit from his fortune. I'd say that's pretty damn cool.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
And if they ever come to take our Shrine to Father Lucas, followers are instructed to make their way to the primary food dispensing bay, where they will be given a special drink taken from the campus vaporators. The effects would be nearly instantaneous.
It is our hopes that our shining example would encourage Jedi everywhere.
And we have a pretty big news rag in SF.
those of us who live in Kansas City and I suppose anyone who lives in Missouri as well call it the KC Star.
Thanks to all of you who download pirated-copies of movies and games from the net, L&M had to move to another studio...
I knew this was going to happen, they are losing BILLIONS because of YOU.
Lucas said he'll likely keep away from the center and instead focus on developing a final "Indiana Jones" film and smaller film projects. it'll be titled, Indiana Jones and The Wrath of George Lucas!
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Slashdot economic rules:
IF you're making money THEN you're making too much. Here let me reduce that for you.
IF I'm making money THEN you all can't have any pffft!
...IT'S A TRAP!
Get your Unix fortune now!
one thing that can't be said about George is that he does thing half-assed
Like, dood, where have you been for the last six years?
And just watch the modders hit me on the head
You ought to get modded down just for pulling this reverse psychology bullshit. It's kinda insulting to us. Here's a radical notion: why don't you post your feelings and let the moderators decide whether to mod you up or down and you refrain from making predictions/comments about the process?
It's not the KS City Star. It is the Kansas City Star. KS is an abbreviation for the state of Kansas, Kansas City (and the Star) are in Missouri, and should therefore not be using the abbreviation.
Lucas and his crew have already done a great job with animation. He spurred the growth of an entire industry that generates computer images: special effects, animation, etc. We have already reached a point where we can economically fill an entire movie with head-turning animation. Consider "Shrek II" and the latest episode of "Star Wars" (SW).
Yet, such a feat does not necessarily translate into a great movie. Consider SW I & II.
SW IV had limited special effects and no animated characters, due to the limits of economical computer-image generation, yet SW IV is far superior in the pace (adequately slow) and the depth of its plot, compared to SW I. The limited computer-image generation forced the writer and the director to focus on the story.
SW I and II are precisely what can go wrong when computer-image generation overwhelms the story. Did you ever notice how, in SW I and II, Yoda's interaction in a 3-way conversation (i.e. with 2 human actors) is awkward and weird? Yoda does not enter and exit a conversation with the same naturalness that a human being (i.e. not computer-generated image) would. His facial expressions are also unnatural. The human actors cannot produce the right facial expressions when they are looking in his direction. When the human actor do look in his direction, they do not seem to be looking straight at him.
Of course, the wonderful "Shrek" saga is an exception to my thesis.
http://www.salvatorefalco.com/archives/000290.html
They call us sheeple, I wonder why?
Movies dont have to be divided into "for children" and "for adult" categories. Countless movies have been made that have appealed to both.
The most successful example of which is the Lord of the Rings series. A good movie appeals to its target market; an epic movie appeals to a broad swath of people that defies a single demographic.
Did you notice that in EP1, Yoda is a puppet and not a CGI character (save for about 2 seconds at the end)?
It's not like they're curing cancer. They're in entertainment, a luxury business. This is a free country, they're quite free to go pick up work anywhere else. McDonalds is always hiring.
You should be working, not perspiring! If you don't like it, you can go work for Pixar. Um...I mean, you can go work for Don Bluth, yeah.
Lucasfilm/ILM had some boring industrial buildings in San Raphael. So this is just catchup.
This doesn't seem like a logical connection to make. :)
;P.
Obviously, it's for fast transfer of high-res images between workstations, but hey, I could be wrong. They *could* have fiber-optic cables for the pure intent of having high-res images on the desktop, but it doesn't seem very likely
I'm not sure what the point of gigabit Ethernet is through a bus than can never pump a gigabit across it. Like putting a Fast Token Ring card on an ISA bus, what is the point if that bandwidth can never be approached by the system interface?
Other than that, the rest of the notice is of little interest as I had my fill of Lucas years ago. He should have done more work after RotJ, but instead faded into the background with ILM. Other studios instead produced the big glitzy works while we waited like idiots for the imagined sequence of wonderful sequels to the first SW movies.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Maybe Jorge will be filming his next blockbuster next door at the Public Health Service Hospital (1) (2)
Joan Baez, Chris Isaac, Bonnie Rait performed... See George with the cast of Beach Blanket Babylon...
Photo Galery
Noooooooo ... !?
Artists benefit? It's a commercial complex. It's for making money. This isn't an art enclave any more than Nickelodeon Studios is. This complex is for making art which can be replicated and sold to earn him even more money.
Movie-goers benefit? So he can make Star Wars 3.5? Or remake them all in stupid 3D?
Lucas made a lot of money off his films and effects studios. He used it as hw saw fit, which was to make a place where he can more effectively more money.
That's all fine. It's his money. But pardon me if I don't get all sappy over it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
And Golem? I thought he interacted pretty well. Or did they cheat by having a real actor there? If thats whats required to get a good effect Lucas should've stuck with the puppet and CGI'd over it.
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
The Good News is that he didn't open this in Bangalore, India.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The campus includes a data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports. Fiber-optics cables are connected to every artist desktop, allowing high-resolution images on each computer. In all, there are 600 miles of cable throughout the campus's four buildings. :-)
Just imagine the multiplayer games one could host.
Really? I liked Ep III, whereas I found Shrek to be dull, predictable, clichéd and poorly animated*.
I remember last xmas Shrek was on TV and it bugged the hell out of me. Then a couple of hours later I watched the DVD of Monsters, Inc. that my sister got for xmas. Talk about chalk and cheese. Monsters, Inc. made me think "Yes, I wasn't imagining it, Shrek is poor."
Why it's so successful, I'm not entirely sure. Probably that darn donkey.
(* This is a reletive term - I mean poorly animated considering the praise it received)
I live in the Presidio, several blocks away from the LucasFilm complex. For one, I am very happy to have this new company move into the park. Although it will mean additional traffic and parking problems, I have found the Presidio to be too quiet. We might even have more decent restaurants and nightlife in the park now.
The development is contraversial because it is located on Federal Propoperty in a National Park. This means that it did not have to go through the byzantine zoning politics that prevent almost all large scale development in San Francisco. Among other things, this meant a high voltage power line brought through a residential neighborhood without the usuall dialogue.
My only qualm is that the Presidio Trust signed a lease with Lucas focusing on the movie studio with a little extra office space and the finished product will reflect office space with a smaller movie studio attached.
At the end of the day, the facility my father calls, "LucasLand" will mean more opportunities for the arts in San Francisco, a beautiful new office complex, a more vibrant Presidio and a positive change for our local culture. I'm excited to live here.
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
I've always thought it would be fun to go on job interviews to some places just to get a chance to look around. It's not like you'd actually take a job if offered. And, then again, you might.
This would easily fit within that category.
There's all the live footage elements to consider - potentially dozens of layers for every final frame - each of which must be stored, converted, colour-graded, maybe stabilised, grain-matched, composited and edited.
What's more, any CG in the movie would be rendered as multiple separate 3D layers, not just a single frame, and all those layers also have to be colour- and grain-matched, unstabilised and composited with the live elements.
I've worked on a scene that required over 40 live and 450 CG layers for each frame of the shot - and each of those layers ranged from 40-80 MB (the shot was around 300 frames). That's around 20 GB per frame of pixels alone, not counting textures, CG geometry etc. And this data was used and re-used repeatedly as the shot evolved over the course of months.
A 10 gbps pipe to each workstation would really have helped, believe me :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Rather, I would call it good movie-making, in that it gave the other actors someone to interact with.
In addition, the animators made extensive use of the actor's facial expressions, body language, etc., in the animation, resulting in a superior product.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Now he can make whole fucking ARMIES of jar-jar binksiesssss..
As I don't one. I've been an unemployed Geek for years and am still suffering and hoping someday employers won't hate us / fire us for being different. Now that Star Wars has left Marin County I can now say that Star Trek is superior as there "is no Star Wars" in Marin County anymore!!!! Yea!
I'll think of a really good SIG just before I die.