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 else will benefit as well.
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 or matters of policy are being hashed out.”
Making a major blockbuster movie takes a lot of work. How much?
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 and has been a bit of a game-changer in terms of simplifying color workflows around the world.
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.
When I was a kid I dissected a frog. Today we dissected a hard drive.
It turns out, we cannot be trusted to pack a box.
Last week a number of the supervisors from Imageworks took a few hours to get hands-on with the latest stereo rigs and equipment...