41–50 of 75 posts
> This wouldn't be the first time we'd talked to Jobs. Three months earlier, on August 4, Steve had invited Ed, me, and Ajit Gill, our financial manager, to his mansion in Woodside, Calif. Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no, that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept his money in the form of a venture inve…
Didn't they have that shop in Richmond in a bad part of town?
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…
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…
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.
When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I would love to walk through one of their internal scene files and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate to.
Edit: I could not find similar to here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2018/
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…
they were abusing their workers rights in a surreptitious manner - not sure how that's a "good studio"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> your presumptuous and uninformed conclusion about them being bad studios they were abusing their workers rights in a surreptitious manner - not sure how that's a "good studio"
No they weren’t. The C-level staff of the parent companies named as defendants in the lawsuit were, and the parent companies are all still in business. The studios that closed were pawns, just like the employees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The bad studios comment wasn't meant to be a judgement of the product or your work. I had meant bad businesses (costs exceed revenues). Take even that with a grain of salt - I was taking all my facts from the comment I responded to and the link. I'm not familiar with this particular saga.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiopeia_(film)
They had very limited resources and were using commercial tools instead of building their own like Pixar. They cheated by having their characters be aliens who were mostly blobs without legs or arms, though they like to complain about Pixar cheating by having many objects be physical models or sculptures that were then digitized instead of fully designing them in the computer.
They reached the big screen second after Pixar, but even if they had been first I doubt they would have been remembered.