Milestone: 15 years in animation & visual effects

Lysenko

Iceland2128 Posts

June 05 2011 04:08 GMT

This spring marks my fifteenth year working in the world of animation and visual effects, so I thought some might find the story of how that came to pass interesting.

Before I go on here's my IMDB page.

Graduation

In the spring of 1992, three events happened nearly at once: I turned twenty-one, I graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in Physics, and my girlfriend of four years, whom I'd known since I was fifteen, dumped me.

Graduating was a lucky break, after a couple very close calls (including failing out of college in my junior year and coming back a year later). The breakup was extremely annoying, because, as it turned out, she dumped me the afternoon of the day that I'd committed to going to graduate school where she was. As of right now, we haven't talked for about twelve years, and I still miss her a lot, but my life has pretty much moved on.

Only a few of you probably have any clue how hard this piece of paper is to get.
Shout out to Day[9], who's done it himself!! :D

Quitting graduate school

Since inertia's a powerful thing, I went off to grad school in the astrophysics program at the University of Arizona, hoping for the best. I didn't really realize how difficult it was going to be dealing with the aftermath of the breakup in the same city my ex lived in, however. We were trying to remain friends, and it was simply a mess -- so after about eight weeks in graduate school, I just left.

My next step might not make much sense if you don't know how tight-knit the Harvey Mudd community is: I started spending my days and nights at the college for the rest of the school year. I slept in suite lounges in the dorms with the permission of my friends and volunteered for the very small media production program there, to have something to do and to have a way to express my frustration with life.

It quickly dawned on me that I had to get a job, though, and my work in the media program reinforced to me that media production might be a very interesting field, so I focused there. However, being desperate, I applied for just about everything else in the world too.

Getting a pointless job.

I wound up working as a radar and optical engineer at Vandenberg Air Force Base, supporting the instruments they used to monitor space and missile launches there. I worked on writing a screenplay but after a couple years I'd pretty much given up on the movie business. I did move on to a job as a software engineer at Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics in the summer of 1995, and that was a good deal more fun (since the Air Force attitudes had bled over heavily into contractor work on the base.)

A surprise interview!

Some months into working at Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics, I got a call from Walt Disney Feature Animation. It turns out that my resume had been sitting on someone's desk for a very long time (probably about a year, dating from when I'd been sending out resumes to leave Vandenberg) and finally had bubbled up to the top.

So, in November of 1995, the same week that Toy Story came out, I interviewed at Disney for an imaging software engineer position on a system called CAPS, which was used to digitally ink-and-paint their traditionally-animated movies.

Pixar had originally developed CAPS, which was used for one shot in The Little Mermaid and all the movies that came after, but the deal with Pixar required that Disney take over maintaining the software after five full movies had been made with it, and I was interviewed shortly after the fifth was released. (The first five all-digital movies were: Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pocahontas.)

The interview went fine, nothing special, as I talked about my imaging software experience, but at some point one of the other guys in the group asked "Why are you interested in working in animation?" So, I started talking about Harvey Mudd's media program and everyone's eyes lit up. It appeared that I had the job.

Working at Disney

At the age of 24, on April 1, 1996, I started working at Walt Disney Feature Animation. They threw me into the lion's den, though I didn't know it at the time -- I was asked to work with a department called Animation Check that had become responsible for a wide range of both artistic and technical work in the digital system. And, as I found out later, the old-timers viewed handing off CAPS from Pixar to Disney as an opportunity to exert greater control over how things were done.

From when I started until the end of the year wrap of Hercules, I pretty much worked my ass off. Fortunately, the excitement of working at Disney had not yet worn off. I had never realized how much WORK traditional animation entailed! Everything was done by hand! Very little of the work could really be automated away by the computer.

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Me and my friend Lauren at the Hunchback of Notre Dame wrap party in June of 1996.

(A note about that picture: A few years later, Lauren married a software engineer who went on to be one of the original developers of WoW, and who left Blizzard only a few months ago. For a time leading up to Starcraft 2's release, he was the Battle.net 2.0 software lead, which made reading TL and the forums hilarious. He was anxious, though, to make clear that none of what made people upset was his fault.)

Several months after I started working on Hercules (which later became my first screen credit) our group had a little meeting. A project in some warehouses over by the 5 freeway to create Disney's first fully computer animated movie desperately needed warm bodies. Was anyone interested in going?

We went around the room. I was first. I said "I would be OK doing whatever I'm needed to do." Everyone else then proceeded to say "please do not send me over there."

So, of course, I was the first one picked.

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Claw chooses who will stay and who will go!!
(me in the Dinosaur production's "war room," 1997)

Dinosaur

Working on the movie Dinosaur was a long, often painful, challenging, and ultimately deeply rewarding experience. Visual effects movies with lots of character animation are the norm today, but in late 1996, nobody had ever made a movie like that.

Dinosaur, 2000

Furthermore, while Disney was widely regarded as the cutting edge of animation, and they had slapped their name all over Toy Story, which was the first fully computer-animated film, Pixar, then an entirely separate company completely controlled by Steve Jobs, certainly had no interest whatever in sharing any of their special knowledge of the area with Disney and creating a potential competitor.

So, we at Disney had to figure it all out ourselves, with mixed results.

Disney hired a large number of department heads and artists from the few companies with real experience in this kind of work at the time: Boss Films, Dreamquest Images, Digital Domain (DD), and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).

The problem with this scheme is that all these companies had figured out how to do this volume of computer animation work on their own, and their ideas of how it should be done didn't fit together.

I wound up lent to the show through most of 1997 and 1998 as the "production pipeline" supervisor for Dinosaur, which generally meant that I spent hours in meetings trying to negotiate agreement between the ILM contingent and the DD contingent on critical issues like how to name the directory where quarter-sized background images went. (One supervisor famously declared that he would quit if we named the directory "qtr" instead of "r4." The decision didn't go his way -- and he stayed.)

Throughout the show, I'd been scrambling to try to get a job in either look development, which consisted of writing the software necessary to create the looks of the various characters at render time, or lighting, but it never quite worked out because I just didn't have the experience. And, since I was still on the books as a "software engineer," once my services weren't needed anymore on Dinosaur, my management didn't really know what to do with me.

So, when my work on the show ended, around the start of 1999, I was told that I should find another job by the end of the year, either within Disney or elsewhere.

Pacific Data Images

Being told to move on was a blessing in disguise. Though it took a while to find another position, I ended up joining Pacific Data Images, one of the original five computer animation companies in the U.S. This meant moving to the San Francisco area.

Up to about when I joined them, PDI was mainly known for most of the computer animated flying logos on national TV in the 80s, and the invention of a technology called "feature-based morphing," which they first used in Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video:

However, in the fall of 1998, Dreamworks released the movie Antz, which was the second-ever fully computer animated film, and had been created completely at PDI.

When I joined, PDI was deep in production on a second fully computer-animated movie for Dreamworks, called Shrek, directed by a long-time PDI animation supervisor named Andrew Adamson (who later went on to work on Shrek 2 and then Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.) We had a company screening shortly after I joined, and everyone walked out knowing that Shrek was going to be a hit.

However, I didn't join that part of PDI. I joined the live action visual effects and commercials group as a technical supervisor.

Our first project in that group was supposed to be the original X-Men. Our tests for it looked fantastic and it was going to push our limits visually -- everyone was excited. Except, it seems, for PDI's leadership, who were concerned that agreeing to the project was too much risk when they were trying to get set up for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. Remember, this was the time of the internet boom, and PDI hoped to have a wildly successful IPO, but it made them incredibly conservative.

So, at the VERY last minute, PDI walked away from X-Men (which went to Digital Domain,) and I wound up working on The Legend of Bagger Vance for a year instead.

By the time that show was over, Dreamworks had bought PDI, and Shrek was a hit.

Working with Steven Spielberg

At that time, Steven Spielberg ran the live-action part of Dreamworks, so you'd think we'd have gotten a lot of work from them. As it turns out, that wasn't the case! PDI had been involved in visual effects for George Clooney's movie The Peacemaker, and PDI, which was in the middle of making Antz at the time, had difficulty putting in the time and money to make the effects look great. This atomic explosion (supervised by my friend Paul Wang, who was a sequence supervisor on Shrek and generally does fantastic work) was a good example.

(This is a link rather than embedded video so that it will skip to the shot I'm talking about)

Anyway, Spielberg was not happy and PDI ended up not getting any work from top-end Dreamworks movies for a long time. However, around when he started on the movie A.I., we finally managed to convince him to give us a second chance.

Having PDI working on small chunks of Spielberg's movies had a hidden benefit out of proportion to our work -- since we bid cheaper than ILM, if our work was good enough, Spielberg could convince ILM to cut their price under the threat of giving us even more work.

We worked on A.I. for the better part of a year, and the crew rolled right over onto a much more memorable movie, Minority Report.

Our group at PDI worked primarily on the "Spyders," which were spidery robots that the cops would deploy to move through a building and scan the occupant's retinas, to locate fugitives.

Tom Cruise, about to have his retina scanned while recovering from an eye transplant -- very bad!

Unfortunately, despite working on Minority Report for several months, the studio was very stingy with screen credits and I did not get one, and since visual effects artists are not guaranteed credit for their work, that was that. Of all the movies on which I was denied credit, that one bugs me more than any other.

Nevertheless, we were all very proud of our work.

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Minority Report Lead compositor Erik Winquist at the wrap party, who later went on to supervise on Lord of the Rings at Weta

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Our supervisor, Henry LaBounta, with Mr. Spielberg himself. Henry, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for Twister, went on to become Chief Art Officer at EA. Note: This was on the set of A.I., hence the art department's brilliant "Country and Western FAG BAR" posters on the door behind them.

Commercials, and winding down

The bad news was that when Minority Report wrapped up, PDI shut down their live action visual effects division. At the time, television commercials were much more profitable, and since Dreamworks now owned PDI, Jeffrey Katzenberg's animation division was pushing harder and harder for a greater focus on fully animated films, and less on very low-margin visual effects work.

So, about half our coworkers were laid off and the rest of us moved into TV commercial production. We ended up working on spots for Intel, Kool-aid, Monster.com, and Sega.

Moving to Los Angeles

In the spring of 2002, when production for Intel's Pentium IV ads were in full swing at PDI, I was asked to spend four months in Los Angeles working at Dreamworks Animation on the movie Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. Sinbad ended up being the last traditionally-animated movie that Dreamworks made.

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The Dreamworks Animation campus at night

While I was in L.A., I got a telephone call saying that there had been a major announcement up at PDI: The commercials group was being shut down, and I was to remain on Sinbad for the rest of the year, after I returned.

Once I got back at the end of my four months, I started negotiating a new contract, and pushed for a sizeable raise, which Dreamworks agreed to provide -- if I'd move to L.A. permanently. I did so in the start of 2003.

A book!

Shortly before leaving for L.A. the first time, I spoke with my friend Chris about the idea of writing a book about scripting for Maya, which (then and now) is one of the most common off-the-shelf products for high-end computer animation.

While I was in L.A. for four months, I spent my free time working on a manuscript, with Chris's help, and by November of 2002, the book had been released:

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MEL Scripting for Maya Animators -- a title designed to hit every possible search term an Amazon user might type

Dreamworks Animation

As it turned out, when Dreamworks bought PDI, they acquired not just a production facility, but a large, well-tuned software system that was very efficient at cranking out fully computer-animated movies. Their interest in getting me to Los Angeles was part of a strategy of adopting PDI's techniques wholesale, thus bypassing the problems Disney had had getting their own fully computer-animated movie system working.

So, I moved to Dreamworks to work on Over the Hedge, which got delayed, then Flushed Away, then Madagascar, and then Over the Hedge again.

Despite the growth pains of adopting tools that only a few people knew how to operate, by the time I worked on Over the Hedge, things were going pretty smoothly, so I managed to talk my way into having a chance to do some actual artistic work. One of the first shots they gave me was a challenging one-off shot that required a lot of thought and care about how to make something that looked beautiful.

My second shot as a lighting artist, ever! From Over the Hedge.

Still, my responsibilities were mostly technical, and when Over the Hedge wrapped up, I moved back in that direction for a while.

Thing is, in late 2004, Dreamworks Animation had had their IPO, and it turns out that my handful of PDI stock options from years before were worth something. The money from that paid off my debts and left me with enough cash to take what I thought was going to be a few months off, before I moved into a full-time lighting position.

The never-ending vacation

I left Dreamworks on a three-month vacation in the summer of 2006, right after Over the Hedge was released. I didn't have a new contract, but it all seemed very close. Until, that is, Dreamworks decided to insist on keeping me at exactly the same rate as I'd been paid before. I really, really felt I deserved a cost of living increase, which would have been maybe 3% at most.

Unfortunately, we didn't come to an agreement.

I had enough money to live for a while, so I wasn't too worried, so I decided I'd take my vacation and work on finding a job once the three months were up. During that time, I started playing WoW, which was easy considering that my days were entirely free and my bills were getting paid out of my savings. I founded and ran a guild (which lasted for about two years) and had nothing but time for it.

Near the end of the year, I interviewed with Blizzard's cinematics group, and though it was promising, it hasn't ever really turned into a job offer, to this day. However, in the spring of 2007, I did get a job offer, which I took gladly, as my savings account was by now running on fumes.

Rhythm & Hues

The job offer was for a top-tier visual effects company called Rhythm & Hues Studios, which was at that time going into production on The Golden Compass. I joined Rhythm as a freelance lighter, which meant that I was hired for the duration of the project only.

Rhythm primarily hires artists as freelance, which (in Rhythm-speak) means they get health benefits but no paid time off. Since anything to get the money flowing was appealing to me at the time, I jumped on it, and Golden Compass looked like a promising movie.

While the film ended up not performing as well as most of us hoped, Rhythm's Bill Westenhofer shared the Academy Award for the film's visual effects, which was a high point for many of us. And, I got to work exclusively as a lighting artist for the first time. (These are two of my shots)

Lyra's daemon, Pan, in the form of a cat, warns her that something horrible is going on.

Lyra examines a trapped "spy-fly" while Pan, in the form of a mouse, looks on.

Commercials, again

In the world of visual effects, feature films are where the best work happens. There's (usually) money and time to make essential effects and animation look great. However, working in feature film effects can be difficult.

Schedules have gotten shorter, so people work much longer hours. Also, like I said, most people are freelance. So, when the opportunity arrived to work in a smaller commercials group, with a team of a few people whom I'd get to know over many projects, and full benefits, I volunteered right away. Many of my younger colleagues couldn't understand why I'd want to work on projects that just didn't have the same time and money devoted to them, but in fact the work is more varied and the projects are short -- get in, do some good work, and get out.

So, since 2008, I've worked in commercials. Here's one of ours, which we animated, lit, and delivered in the course of about 8 weeks:

Recommended by Australian dentists!

I should point out that I'm at a point where I love my work, I really enjoy the team with whom I work, and I couldn't really care less about the glory of working on big name movies. The technical challenge is substantial, and it's nice to be well-regarded for being able to get good work done quickly.

It's a long way from physics, and a long way from the day I showed up at orientation at Disney, but it's been a good fifteen years and I'm hoping for at least 25 more.

My demo reel from late 2008 (no audio):

Me as I look today

LordWeird

United States3411 Posts

June 05 2011 04:12 GMT

Wow. Must have been a ton of fun doing all of this. This is really interesting and I for one am glad you shared ^^

DeepBlu2

United States975 Posts

June 05 2011 04:12 GMT

Quite a journey you have been on. Do you see yourself in this industry 10-15 years from now?

MaestroSC

United States2073 Posts

June 05 2011 04:17 GMT

Very very very cool. Really interesting and amazing. I envy you and what you get to do for a living... and if that blue 350z is urs im even more jealous lol...

But very cool/interesting to do what you do and work on some of the projects you worked on. I am uber jealous. I went to art school to try to do game art/design... and in art school i learned that art is a gift/talent that people have. I was decent..but i wasnt nearly as amazing as some of my classmates, and i eventually went back to state college because i realized that art and that "talent" was simply not one of mine... tho i wish it was lol.

but anyways im starting to rant.. but VERY COOL. You seem to have an amazing job and you love it. I am envious

flamewheel

FREEAGLELAND26780 Posts

June 05 2011 04:24 GMT

This was a ridiculous read, and you've told an amazing story--thank you for sharing!

It's kind of weird, but yesterday after watching the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, I stayed afterwards to read the credits. I had never really thought about it too much, but reading the long list of people--not just the actors--that helped to make the movie what it was, it hit me that it's not entirely about those who are the on-screen stars. So after reading this today, I've definitely gained a new level of respect for those who work not only behind the scenes, but on the scenes themselves as well.

tobi9999

United States1966 Posts

June 05 2011 04:27 GMT

Congrats to you =)

That's quite a lot of things that have been done, but then again that's over 15 years of stuff, it's interesting to note how much "stuff" can happen over time. Sometimes I wish to be able to look into the future to see what's going on with my life. :/

Zona

40426 Posts

June 05 2011 04:27 GMT

Thanks for sharing, a great read.

Lysenko

Iceland2128 Posts

June 05 2011 04:30 GMT

On June 05 2011 13:12 DeepBlu2 wrote:
Quite a journey you have been on. Do you see yourself in this industry 10-15 years from now?

That's a very interesting question. It's hard to say. Over the last ten years there's been a move to do more of the work overseas, both due to tax advantages and lower pay rates, but there will always be a need for people here in the U.S. I suspect that my technical skills will keep me employable, but we'll have to see.

I will say one thing: I'm not afraid of having to move into a different field, should that become necessary. However, I can't quite imagine what I'd like more than what I'm doing, unless it's as much fun and many times the money.

if that blue 350z is urs im even more jealous lol...

I bought it in 2003, and I'm still driving it. I hope to keep it running at least another 10 years.

From an earlier blog post, here's the license plate I have on it right now:

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BroOd

Austin10831 Posts

June 05 2011 04:36 GMT

Fascinating blog. You mean to tell me a TL member worked on Fast & Furious and we didn't hear about it?!

Zona

40426 Posts

June 05 2011 04:51 GMT

#10

whoops, answered

Lysenko

Iceland2128 Posts

June 05 2011 04:59 GMT

#11

On June 05 2011 13:36 BroOd wrote:
Fascinating blog. You mean to tell me a TL member worked on Fast & Furious and we didn't hear about it?!

Go here and watch the clip entitled "Clip - Land Train." That's most of our sequence.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/fastandfurious/

If you're looking at that and wondering what's fake, here are some things to watch for:

* Any wide shot of a person on a moving trailer is entirely fake.

* The whole thing was shot on a nice wide road with perfectly flat shoulders -- all the hills and cliffs and walls of rock were painted in Photoshop and projected onto 3D geometry.

* Any spraying gasoline is computer animated.

* Any "liquid nitrogen" spray is computer animated.

The one thing that's real is at the end of the sequence they did blow up the cab and the first section of the trailer and knock it over a cliff. The footage from that was pretty mind-blowing. Most of what's surrounding it is, however, our work.

Oh, and fully-loaded gasoline tankers PROBABLY do not bounce like that. My physics background tells me that they'd crack open like an egg, but hey, I'm no expert, lol.

Then, if you want a laugh, watch this "making of" featurette in which they liberally intercut our CG shots with people talking about how it was all real and very scary:

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/fast-and-furious-2009/featurette-land-train

shindigs

United States4795 Posts

June 05 2011 05:10 GMT

#12

This is completely amazing and engrossing, thank you very much for sharing. A bit ironic that read this to procrastinate studying for my physics final! Pretty crazy career path you had right afterward but it gives me hope that my future isn't too doomed. Definitely have a great appreciation for your work.

a176

Canada6688 Posts

June 05 2011 05:19 GMT

#13

Its inspirational to hear you've been doing what you love, and getting paid for it, for most of your life

Lysenko

Iceland2128 Posts

June 05 2011 05:24 GMT

#14

BTW a couple notes to connect this back with what we're all here for:

I originally got into WoW because most of the Dreamworks lighting department had a guild together! In the early days I used to tease them about wasting their time on "World of Snorecraft." When I eventually played, I got sucked right in, but I didn't have the presence of mind to roll on their server until much later.

Their guild name: "The Betty Horde Clinic," currently on Shu'halo. They've mostly moved on to other activities, probably Portal 2.

Also, when I was in lighting at Dreamworks, they used to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory in these crazy 15 on 15 team games. They'd play at lunch and in the afternoon. There was a game going on with the IT folks where the IT folks would try to find the ET binary we were using, so they could delete it, and we'd move it around and make hidden copies. Production management on our movies looked the other way as long as people got their work done.

Currently, in the commercials group at Rhythm, our office has the Blizzcon 2010 SC2 and Diablo 3 posters up on the walls. Hoping to get more when I attend this year.

Edit: BTW on re-reading this post, my nostalgia meter goes through the roof watching the morphing in the Black or White video, because I absolutely remember when that was a completely badass "OMG HOW DID THEY DO THAT" visual effect.

Funny thing is, today that technology is used all the time in completely invisible ways to cover up mistakes and resolve technical problems, but it's very rarely front-and-center like that.

GenesisX

Canada4267 Posts

June 05 2011 05:37 GMT

#15

That was an amazing story... keep doing what you do! I'm sure more outstanding films / commercials will come out of your work! ^^

Endymion

United States3701 Posts

June 05 2011 05:48 GMT

#16

Man I loved Golden Compass, great job on it! I really appreciate the work that you did in the film, thanks so much for making a story from my childhood come to life!

Lysenko

Iceland2128 Posts

June 05 2011 05:55 GMT

#17

On June 05 2011 14:48 Endymion wrote:
Man I loved Golden Compass, great job on it! I really appreciate the work that you did in the film, thanks so much for making a story from my childhood come to life!

Thanks. We were somewhat disappointed, actually, because the movie (and our work) originally covered the entire ending to the book

+ Show Spoiler +

specifically, Asriel killing Roger to power his machine, and Lyra repudiating her parents and walking into the portal to Citagazze

but test audiences hated it and so the decision was made to cut the story a bit short and end on a high note, leaving those bits for act 1 of a second movie.

The sequence supervisor from the sequence that got cut got to go to the Academy Awards with our VFX supervisor. I'm not sure how I'd feel if I were him, but that would be a nice gesture.

Backpack

United States1776 Posts

June 05 2011 05:56 GMT

#18

Agreed!

I loved the visual adaptation of one of my favorite stories (though i wish they could have made the whole trilogy.)

I'm going to school for computer animation starting this fall and although I'd like to get into something more sci-fi based, I hope to have a story like yours some day!

Lysenko

Iceland2128 Posts

June 05 2011 05:59 GMT

#19

On June 05 2011 14:56 Backpack wrote:
I'm going to school for computer animation starting this fall

One suggestion: PLEASE do not borrow a ton of money to do this. You're welcome to PM me and we can talk over your plans. I say this because there are a lot of computer animation programs that are enormously expensive, and it can be very difficult to pay off the loans once you've taken them out.

That said, I support your effort to achieve your dreams. Just that there are many ways to go about it.

Essbee

Canada2371 Posts

June 05 2011 06:14 GMT

#20

Amazing read, thanks a lot for sharing it with us. I love these quality posts/blogs.

Cheers!

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