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Jeff & Rob Visit Lucasfilm
Last fall Hemos started working for Perforce: one of their clients is Lucasfilm. One thing led to another, and last week I got to visit their Presidio facility in San Francisco. Their security policies prevent me from saying anything about the super sweet things I saw inside the building, but I can post this picture of us next to the Yoda statue outside the front door.
Thanks to Matt Janulewicz for getting us in the front door and showing us around, Daryll Jacobson for opening a cool door and Tina Mills for pressing click. I can now say that I've been physically closer to Starwars.com than I have to Slashdot.org since the 1998 when it lived under my desk.
Finally, the gauntlet has been thrown: if you work somewhere cool (Pixar? Apple? NASA? The White House? Comerica Park?) drop me an email! I am not above using T-Shirts as bribery to see cool places!
What do you think this is? Your personal blog?
;)
(And for those who don't get the joke, yes, i know
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
While I suppose it wouldn't mean all that much when it comes to day-to-day work on some level it would be nice to work somewhere "cool". A company with "mythical" server parks rather than the typical "one small server room per site plus a couple of rented racks in a datacenter for external stuff".
Oh well, maybe I'll find a job at one of those places someday...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
You can see the dungeon where Lucas rapes our childhood memories.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Whatever happened to the scrappy twenty-somethings I met at the Hilton annex at Comdex?
Best Slashdot Co
Nerd goes to Lucasfilm; can't talk about it. No news at 11.
See? http://www.mrericsir.com/blog/local/yoda-statue/
Jeez, why don't my personal blog entries make the front page of Slashdot?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Didn't you notice? Slashdot.org is just a seamless redirect to Digg now.
Why isn't this in Idle?
Oh yeah, never mind.
All of life is a, "Hey, look at me!"
Or, "Hey, look at my stuff!" But that's just look-at-me by proxy.
Their security policies prevent me from saying anything about the super sweet things I saw inside the building...
Their security policies sound more like industrial trade secret policies, unless the cool things they have inside are anti-terrorism devices.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Finally, the gauntlet has been thrown: if you work somewhere cool (Pixar? Apple? NASA? The White House? Comerica Park?) drop me an email!
Why would you need to be emailed when one could just post their cool job in the comments section?
That had better be banta drool on Luke's landspeeder!
Whew! This water sure is cold!
I kinda like this sorta post. I used to feel a closer connection with the /. mods back in the day than recently. It didn't always feel like one Apple/Google press release after another like it does nowadays. It seemed like there was more editorial content. (Not that I'm asking for JonKatz to return...)
frog blast the vent core
I used to come to slashdot for a does or three of daily nerdism. Then I came for techy news. Then I came to watch the flamewars when I needed an excuse to eat popcorn. Now? Now I come to see that life really is about who you know.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
I think it's an attempt at a subliminal slashvertisement to get you to lobby for the usage of Perforce where you work.
Kristopeit, have you considered turning your anger into creativity?
For example, I looked at, "Slashdot = stagnated," and I noticed the anagram, "That LAN SSD goatse'd."
I thought this amusing because LANs, SSDs and goatse are frequent topics of Slashdot.
I transformed hate into a smile.
*places a flower in your musket*
Uh, you do realize that Slashdot actually *is* Rob's personal blog, right?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I think it's an attempt at a subliminal slashvertisement to get you to lobby for the usage of Perforce where you work.
Anybody lobbying for the use of Perforce should be shown the door.
I'm not a Star Wars geek but I seriously want that Yoda statue.
Oh, and I thought Episodes II & III were better then Episode VI and quite possibly V.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Well yesterday I went to an even cooler place, but I can't tell you. There was so much amazing stuff, I was shocked. This was like a million times better than going to Lucasfilm. After the first couple of things happened I knew that my life had changed forever. Thanks to Frank for telling me about this fantastic place, Joseph for pointing out the last things and letting me take one home, and Sarah - you know exactly what for! I'm going to go post this on slashdot now so that all the nerds can get jealous! /sarcasm
also, seriously slashdot, wtf?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Can't wait for the pics in front of the Orc on the Blizzard campus. Far more impressive than Lucas' Yoda. ;-)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/anshinritsumai/4799301377/
Now that everyone on slashdot knows where to get a real yoda statue, are we already taking bets on how long it'll be still there...
Was this just "click-mongering"? Glad I have ads disabled...
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Been wondering what happened to him.
Or maybe Bill and Ted, but older, and that Yoda statue is filling in for George Carlin.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you were an animator or technical director at Pixar, you could expect to live there during production. The film has to be done on time, you can't miss the Christmas season, etc. I saw many families bring dinner to Pixar almost every evening so that they could eat together, as mommy or daddy wasn't coming home until really late. I was in studio tools, not production, and thus was allowed to have a normal life - and seeing what happened to the production folks, I never wanted to be a technical director.
The pay was OK, but not great, and for technical folks the attribution was something you might have to slo-mo your VCR to see. There were 20 people who wanted a job standing behind every one that actually had a job in film, so there was no incentive for studios to pay better.
At the time (it may be better now) the tools were the result of 30 years of evolution, and you had to know about 30 languages to be a TD.
I've found my involvement in Open Source to be a lot more fulfilling.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Who?
It's not that big a deal. I've been to Lucasfilm's sound stage at "Kerner Optical" (which used to be a cover story for Lucasfilm.) That's where they do physical effects and model work. Got to see their prop and camera shops, and some cameras used for notable shots that fans probably care about but I don't. They were the first to put a camera in a carbon-fibre housing, that camera has been through many crashes and explosions, and it still works. Nice engineering.
They were doing some R&D work on 3D cameras where the separation between the cameras could be varied dynamically. Watching that on a 3D monitor while someone twiddles the interocular distance is a non-fun visual experience, close to headache-inducing.
They were showing off FrameFree, which is a frameless video compression technology. It decomposes the image into layers which are then morphed from frame to frame, allowing arbitrarily slow motion. They sold that off, but some of the technology for cleanly decomposing images went into 2D to 3D conversion technology.
The most unusual thing about the place is that almost all the employees have been there for decades. Someone who'd been there three years was referred to as the new guy. You just don't see that kind of low employee turnover any more.
I've been to some computer animation places. They're just cube farms, not very interesting. They used to have high-end SGI workstations, but now it's all PC. (I saw that transition between 1998 and 2002; on my first visit to Sony Imageworks, the shop was 90% SGI machines, with a few PCs. Four years later, 80% PCs, with a few SGI machines for legacy work. SGI's "Silicon Studio" division is long gone, and the Computer Museum has their building.)
Watching a really good animator use a high-end animation package makes you realize that some people have really, really, good 3D visualization skills. There's a classic comment from some sculptor that he just chips away the stone until the object emerges. That's what working 3D artists do all day. Fast. There's much drawing and little adjustment. Pros don't tweak meshes; they draw them.
If you're not into either the "Hollywood thing" or fandom, dealing with the film industry is generally frustrating. Either they're in pre-production and have trouble coming up with a valid credit card, or they're in production and want a new feature yesterday.
This is like walking into the locker room in high school and saying, "I just slept with the head cheerleader," and then refusing to give out any details. Party foul!
http://www.bynarystudio.com
What's with the fountain in front the of Yoda statue? It makes him look pissed.
I was working there last year. Why couldn't you visit then?!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
This is a nice story and all, but I was hoping to see photos of Hemos and CmdrTaco at Lucasfilm, not two random old fogies hanging around next to Yoda.
I have been at ILM ( in the old space) - got a great tour and the new Pixar space ( with my students from Stanford via my Facial Animation course), heck I gave a recent talk at Google and saw things I can't talk about either but why would I blog about it or put it on Slashdot if I do not have something informative to say. I sure there are 200 more folks like me who have done this who are slashdot members. Including folks who work at these places. Seems like an ego post.
But I'm still stuck with RCS you insensitive clod!
I've seen Matt Janulewicz put cashews in his nose. He's a Legumist.
Keine eier