Category: Blog
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Lucasfilm has released the teaser trailer for Episode 7 today. I’m loving the new job at Industrial Light and Magic and happy to see this trailer being enjoyed in the wild. Also, I may have found a new desktop background.
Things I learned as CTO at Sony Pictures
For the past few years I’ve been the CTO of a division of Sony Pictures heading up Imageworks, Animation, and more recently Colorworks and Post Production. Before this time, I’d had opportunities to lead large teams on movies, but had never served in an executive position. These notes are mostly for myself, but hopefully someone…
Creativity Inc.
A few great quotes from the excellent book by Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc. “There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.” “Believe me, you don’t want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas…
Let’s make a blockbuster
Making a major blockbuster movie takes a lot of work. How much?
Trick Work
What a vista opens before us at the very mention of trick-work! There is hardly a single fantastic idea which cannot be given existence upon the screen. The masterpieces of the magicians and wizards form the simplest problems for the cameraman. Trickery in one form or another is possibly the greatest single factor in the…
Academy Award for OpenColorIO
At this year’s Academy Scientific And Technical Achievement Awards show, OpenColorIO was among 19 other winners. If you haven’t heard of OpenColorIO, it’s a color management framework that makes managing color for cinema and video much more straightforward for engineers and artists alike. It’s been adopted by most of the major 2d and 3d applications for our business…
Ask who
Working at large companies requires involvement with lots of people, across separate departments, divisions and business units. A lot of the time, blame gets assigned to a “group”, rather than a person. A while ago, I learned from one of my favorite producers to always ask, “Who?”. Departments are rarely the problem and a department can never…
Academy Award for Katana
This weekend the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Steve LaVietes, Jeremy Selen and Brian Hall an Academy Award for their work on Imagework’s Katana. Not surprisingly, it was a fantastic night.
