The Real Story of Pixar • Hacker News Board

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#31

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #20

bleair wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also relevant https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage...

I worked for two separate studios, one at DreamWorks and one at Disney, that were both involved in this saga, and both have since been shuttered. (Edit: to clarify they were involved as part of the class, not to my knowledge involved in collusion.) Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like $4k or something, not enough to make any real differe…

Ultimately, this is why we have regulation: because if behavior is allowed that lowers the cost to do business, businesses in a highly competitive space will eventually do it.

It's important to hold regulators responsible for policing these companies, because otherwise market forces will tend to drag quality-of-life down for employees.

(Whether no-poaching agreements should be considered price-fixing is a separate question, but assuming they are, they must be enforced or the end result is employee harm across the industry, because prices are a function of what the competitor will pay too).

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#32

Post by gumby » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #29

NotSwift wrote: post #2

This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really amazing company is that they also have great graphical designers and story writers. It is the integration that makes Pixar movies so great.

There's a story told by (if memory serves) Lasseter that when they showed Luxo Jr. in 1986 at SIGGRAPH, someone came up to him afterwards with a question. He was dreading the conversation, because he thought they were going to ask some terribly technical question and he'd have to flag down one of the studio members for help, but the questioner just asked "So is the big lamp the mom or the dad?" ... and that's when he…

I don't really follow computer graphics much less SIGGRAPH and yet after Luxo Jr was shown there even I heard about it. It really was a huge deal.

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#33

Post by gumby » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

edge17 wrote: post #11

tablespoon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview? My understanding is that the oil and gas industry is pretty heavy needs for scientific computation and data visualization. That's how they discover new places to drill.

What year are we talking? I get that is a pretty big use case now, but back then (mid 1980s?) was it also the case?

When Fairchild got out of the computing business (84/85 ish) it was the huge oilfield services company Schlumberger that bought the AI lab run by Marty Tenenbaum. IIRC S had some Crays and a Connection Machine. Schlumberger Palo Alto was across the street (other side of Foothill Expwy) from PARC. IIRC they had a lot of interesting visualization work; I turned them down (despite their excellent research staff) for PARC because I wanted to work on theory of computation.

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#34

Post by gumby » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

edge17 wrote: post #10

salamanderman wrote: post #4

They tried to sell my dad some machines. He was in the oil industry. The sale didn't work out. My dad later had a job interview with them. That didn't work out either. Both were probably for the best, but what a different life I would have had if either had gone the other way.

Why was oil and gas a target for sales for them? I'm sure the industry has a ton of money, but back then what was the use case?

They do a lot of seismic work to see what's underground (set off explosions, map the results) and need to crunch and visualize a lot of data.

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#35

Post by dahart » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #31

dahart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for two separate studios, one at DreamWorks and one at Disney, that were both involved in this saga, and both have since been shuttered. (Edit: to clarify they were involved as part of the class, not to my knowledge involved in collusion.) Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like $4k or something, not enough to make any real differe…

Ultimately, this is why we have regulation: because if behavior is allowed that lowers the cost to do business, businesses in a highly competitive space will eventually do it. It's important to hold regulators responsible for policing these companies, because otherwise market forces will tend to drag quality-of-life down for employees. (Whether no-poaching agreements should be considered price-fixing is a separate qu…

I fully agree about the need for regulation, especially because it matters more in other commodity industries (farming, food, construction, etc.) much more than it does in computer graphics.

There wasn’t a noticeable reduction in my own quality of life, but that’s not to say others didn’t feel it, nor that it wouldn’t have happened left unchecked, I don’t know.

Once after a movie’s crunch time, I wanted to trade my accumulated overtime bonus for comp time (time off) instead. The studio refused, and I was initially upset but then discovered that in California it was illegal for them to agree to it. The reason is that labor jobs in the past had abused comp time by rewarding employees who were working too much with forced time off in which they weren’t getting paid. This would be awful for farm workers or any labor job, really, and more damaging the lower the pay. I’m happy this law is protecting them even when I didn’t want it applied to me.

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#36

Post by pseudosudoer » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #30

Wondered what "the whiteboard incident" was.... “One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs w…

I'm glad someone stood up to Jobs, what a complete and utter asshole. Nothing says job security like telling your boss that their demands are "bullshit"

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#37

Post by egypturnash » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:10 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #28

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, another way to read this is that these studios weren't viable if they had to play by the rules. So they broke the rules and violated the rights of their staff. Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed. The film industry didn't die that day - just some bad studios.

> Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed. I happen to know for a fact that’s not true in either case of the two studios I worked for. I also don’t particularly appreciate your presumptuous and uninformed conclusion about them being bad studios. Both I worked for were quite good studios, one of them being PDI which made the Shrek & Madagascar movies. No idea to what degree the studios were…

I don’t feel like the lawsuit really changed salaries either

A couple years ago I talked to a few of my friends in the 2d animation industry and they were like "all the studios are constantly trying to stretch the job descriptions to get more work out of what's already a punishing workload". It's a brutal business all around, even in their side of things where they actually have a union. There's a lot of people willing to work for peanuts because they get to be part of the magic, including me twenty years ago.

I look from outside and I really dunno if I feel like the broad cg/vfx/animation industry's sustainable. Everything costs so damn much and the field's increasingly crowded, despite it all slowly turning into divisions of Disney competing with itself.

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#38

Post by bob1029 » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

ralph84 wrote: post #18

This is why I hate the "sell shovels to miners" advice. No, the biggest winners are the ones who vertically integrate and capture the full value stack, not the tools vendors.

Vertical integration is so clearly the best path when you are operating in technology, and especially when dealing with pure software plays. If you control everything down to the bare metal, no one can ever fuck with you. Your common denominator is your adversaries common denominator too. Only super exotics like Apple have actually captured a true 100% vertical down through the hardware, and the impact of this shows in the market.

Vertical integration can be a massive mistake too. Usually manifesting itself as rewriting external dependencies to use in-house functionality before you have established happy customers, cash flow and/or business value propositions.

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#39

Post by soperj » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

pseudosudoer wrote: post #36

JKCalhoun wrote: post #30

Wondered what "the whiteboard incident" was.... “One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs w…

I'm glad someone stood up to Jobs, what a complete and utter asshole. Nothing says job security like telling your boss that their demands are "bullshit"

complete megalomaniac.

Re: The Real Story of Pixar

#40

Post by EvanAnderson » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:44 PM UTC

Back in 2017 a "Humble Bundle" package included the Lawrence Levy book "To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History"[0]. I got the book there and really enjoyed it.

Levy was brought in, by Jobs, as CFO of Pixar prior to the IPO and the book is concerend with more of the business side of Pixar pivoting from hardware company to studio.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28114529-to-pixar-and-be...