The Birth of "Avatars"

I could illustrate the entire book with video clips readily available on YouTube -- case in point: Chapter 24 ("Stay Small, Be the Best, and Don't Lose any Money") talks about Lucasfilm's new Games Group, and some of their experiments in applying technology to entertainment. A company called Quantum Computer Services asked Lucasfilm to develop some unique product that would utilize the new consumer modems and their online service. Remember, THIS is what online home computing was like in 1985 (watch 30 seconds and you'll get the idea):



Chip Morningstar came up with a new kind of game, one where people online had a virtual character in the game, which he called an "avatar." The community he created was Lucasfilm's HABITAT, and it represents the original MMORPG. Here is a promo tape of Habitat (1986) put online by another Lucasfilm alum, and online community pioneer Randy Farmer:



Quantum didn't stick with Habitat, but a few years later, they changed their name to AOL (America Online). Morningstar, while perhaps best known for this pioneering work, teamed up with another Lucasfilm Games alum Doug Crockford, and developed JSON - key software for stuff that makes webpages cool. Here's Chip's website.

Lucasfilm, Fractals and Videogames: Rescue on Fractalus

With all the interest in Vol Libre, I thought it would be interesting to show some of the connections going on behind the scenes that I discuss in the book. For instance, in 1982 the Lucasfilm computer guys were moving around the Lucasfilm "complex" trying to make room for some new guys that were hired to start to develop videogames after a deal was struck between Lucasfilm and Atari. David Fox, one of the three initial developers on games, found himself sharing an office with Loren Carpenter, who was still exploring the fractal algorithms he had pioneered. In their first day in the office, Fox and Carpenter wondered if there was a way to combine their interests. From DROIDMAKER, Ch 18 "A Hole in the Desert":

"David Fox grabbed Peter Langston and they wrestled up a spare Atari 800 computer and a couple of ring-bound volumes on programming the 6502 chip. Loren Carpenter went home again. Three days later he came into the office beaming.
"I want to show you something," he said to Fox, who pulled his chair over to Loren's computer. He had done it. He had recreated, in primitive form, the fractal generation of mountains, just as he had done in Vol Libre, just as he did as an element in the Genesis Effect, but in real time."

He was generating shapes and handling the hidden surfaces in real time on the tiny tiny CPU in an Atari videogame console.

"Do you think we have a game?" asked Fox.
"Absolutely," Langston replied.

Their experiments worked and Fox went on to design a game around the idea*, one of the first two games from the new Games Division at Lucasfilm (a team that would eventually become Lucasarts Entertainment): presenting Rescue on Fractalus (watch and compare it to Vol Libre):



* Carpenter and Fox were eventually separated at least in part because they continued to enjoy distracting each other (chuckle) and mostly because their office space in E Building was ready...While Fox was developing Fractalus, Loren Carpenter was inventing and refining his rendering software, a tool that eventually became Pixar's "Renderman."

For more on Fractalus, check out David Fox's website, Electric Eggplant.

1984 Pool Balls, by Pixar

I remember being in college and seeing the cover of a magazine with this photo on it. It had a headline "This Photo is Fake" and it proceeded to explain that it was made by a computer. I looked as closely as I could, at each detail, and it was utterly realistic. I was stunned. (I also had no idea that a year later I would be working with those guys.)

Recently I found a very cool posting in the FXGuide about a podcast they did with Rob Cook, the "author" of this photo, and still a scientist at Pixar. "This year is the 25th Anniversary of the Pixar 1984 pool ball shot," the posting noted. The post reads in part:

With the release of the critically acclaimed film UP by Pixar, we acknowledge that 2009 marks 25 years since the famous Pool Ball shot 1984. In this week's fxpodcast we talk to Rob Cook of Pixar about the some of the history surrounding that landmark shot, his own career and the industry today.

Chapter 21 of Droidmaker is called My Breakfast with Andre and it tells the back story in this era, and puts that photo in the larger context of the birth of Pixar. If this part of history resonates for you, check out Act III from DROIDMAKER. And if you're a 3D artist, you might enjoy the efforts depicted in the FXGuide posting about re-creating that image.

"Vol Libre" 1980 Pioneering CG Film

Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo.
In Chapter 11 of Droidmaker I discuss the hiring of one of the key members of the original Pixar team - Loren Carpenter. He had heard about Lucas' new computer braintrust that was starting at Lucasfilm in 1979, and he wanted to be a part. As an employee of Boeing, he spent his spare time putting together one of the pioneering uses of Mandelbrot's new fractal mathematics on computer graphics. "Would it make things look real?" Carpenter made a short film to demonstrate his new concept. It was called "Vol Libre," and he showed it to a packed house at SIGGRAPH 1980. He was hoping to attract the attention of Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, who everyone knew would be in attendance. They were. Loren was hired on the spot.

Loren Carpenter is still at Pixar -- the Chief Scientist. In honor of the upcoming gathering in New Orleans for the 2009 SIGGRAPH, I asked him if he'd make this very rare film available. Here it is. Vol Libre, "Flying Free."

Skywalker Sound, 1987

Here's another blast from the past. My last year at Lucasfilm was the company's 10 year anniversary (1977-1987) and there were a range of festivities, some of which i crashed... anyway, Skywalker Sound (which back then was "Sprocket Systems") made an anniversary/demo reel which i just saw online and decided to re-post here for your enjoyment. (Personally, i would have preferred it without the orchestral theme, and let the sound work speak for itself... but whatever.) If you like this sort of thing it's a worthy 6 minutes. As I have said before here, my book DROIDMAKER (Act I, in particular) will provide a great deal of context for the moments you see illustrated here, and the people in the shots.

TRON

I'm sort of glad to see a new look at TRON. I loved it as a kid - and pushed the release of my book Defending the Galaxy (1982) so that I could include some screen shots of the "new" videogame that was released along with the movie (a first, i'm pretty sure). Back then I thought the effects were cool. Writing Droidmaker, I got new appreciation for the movie - and the technological "arms race" between Lucasfilm (working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn) and Disney (and their tech outsiders) working on Tron. Lucasfilm won - both in releasing first, and in having a far more successful movie to try out their seminal computer graphics. (The full backstory of the Genesis Effect in Star Trek and the simultaneous work on TRON, you'd read Ch. 16 of DROIDMAKER, called "1,621 Frames.") Still, TRON holds a special place in geeky boomer's hearts.

At ComicCon this week, geeks got a first look at the long-awaited TRON sequel, Tron Legacy.

Olympus ALMOST Gets It.

This is the wave of the near-future. True story. Last April a young Japanese animator (dokugyunyu, aka Taijin Takeuchi)* produced a really original, interesting, idiosyncratic video on YouTube: Stop Motion with Wolf and Pig (aka "A Wolf Loves Pork"). Just watch a minute and you'll get the idea, if you don't want to commit to the whole work.



As of today it's had almost 2.1 Million views. Today I was just forwarded a link to another YouTube video. It looks like this:



It's called the "PEN STORY" and it also sports a home-made folky quality. Except it's REALLY good. Quite brilliant in many ways, nicely executed, and if it weren't for the glaring ripped-off quality of the original, it would be a wonderful experience to watch. I recommend this video. It's really good. Still, it's sometimes hard to enjoy when you have seen what it borrowed from. (The new video text credits sincerely acknowledge Taijin Takeuchi's "brilliant work," but it still bugs me.) Anyway, this isn't my real problem. My problem is that the video is an advertisement for the Olympus PEN camera. And unlike the more subliminal Geiko insurance videos, they plaster their banner across the end of the video in such a way as to make me feel a little gross for having enjoyed this so much.

It's clearly labeled as an advertisement, sort of. Unlike the sneakier unmarked ads from Geiko, at least they are upfront about it. But Geiko was so sneaky they didn't even put a logo on it. It made the video fun, and I'd suggest, particularly viral. I feel like Geiko did this 21st Century Ad thing right: quiet, fun, subtle. It got people talking and you had to be a geek to even know it was an ad; Here it is - almost 2 million views.



I'm just guessing, but I'm pretty sure this was what Olympus is hoping to create with the PEN video, and... I don't think they'll do it, or maybe I just hope they don't do it. They've got 700 thousand views since July 2 (I suppose i'd kill for that kind of attention for Droidmaker!), so I guess we'll know soon enough. Hell, I'm blogging about it. Maybe that's all they want.

Anyway, if you're going to experience the ad, at least tip the hat to dokugyunyu*.

POST SCRIPT: http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/dailymotion/pen_story_stopmotion?id=x9supt

DROIDMAKER FAQ, pt 2: Independent Publishing in 2009

There is also another Droidmaker story here, a second story. A story about writing an independent “mostly unauthorized” book about George Lucas, Francis Coppola and Pixar, three enormously private “organizations” with common history. There is no way to write about such ferociously independent spirits as Lucas and Coppola, and not want that level of creative control myself, for my work. The story itself is about how they invented technology to give themselves that kind of control. And now I was going to use technology to create and market a book about them, and maintain a comparable kind of creative control. Of course, you cannot get that kind of “final cut” in book publishing from an industrial publishing machine any more than Lucas or Coppola could get it from Warner Bros in the 1970s. I understood that to have full control of my work I had to publish with a small independent publisher.

DROIDMAKER was published by Triad, an academic press in Florida. This book was handcrafted by me – author and illustrator, photographer, page designer. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, used to quip that I would have ground the pulp and made the paper too, if I had thought of it. Hand pressed each page. I didn’t, but it often feels like I did. I committed more than two years to pulling this story together with an dedication to accuracy and critical inquiry. Lucas had said he didn't care what I wrote, as long as I did my own interviews and used direct sources and avoided secondary sources like the existing (small) array of books and print articles.

So in 2005 I was producing an "important" book, but I had two significant crosses to bear: First, by publishing independently I didn’t have the distribution clout that a major publisher had in terms of access to sales reps, bookstores, and media. Second, in exchange for the remarkable transparency and trust I received from Lucasfilm, Zoetrope and Pixar, and the other individuals with whom I worked, the powers-that-be politely insisted that they play no role in the promotion of the work. Not only because these are businesses that profit from this sort of intellectual property, and are not comfortable with giving that equity (and control) away; but more importantly, because this was their history, and a company cannot write its own history. Not really. Lucas understood this, and I understood this. It would be, perhaps, unseemly and self-serving for the range of individuals I interviewed to “promote” a book that sets them in the pantheon of history. Not Lucas. Not Coppola. Not Catmull, nor Lasseter. None could help promote the book.

I was starting to feel a little like Cassandra: Blessed with unprecedented access, and cursed not to be read.

Over the next year I sold perhaps 6,000 books and over the subsequent years maybe 10,000 in total.

Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.

On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Copenhagen, Denmark, who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.

The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. I'm still letting that sink in.

$600M Deal with Exxon

Craig Venter from last year's TED, and now this phenomenal deal with Exxon. Read it here at Reuters. (Nice work Steve.)

I think my favorite bit from Venter's talk was afterward, when Chris went up and sat with him...
Chris: "Do you get accused of playing God?"
Craig: "Oh... we're not playing."

1976 ILM "Home Movie" *RARE*

I don't know where Michael Heilemann finds this stuff... but here is an EXTREMELY RARE Super8mm home video shot put together by David Berry in 1976-1978 from inside the original Industrial Light & Magic facility in Van Nuys during the making of Star Wars. It shows the work and fun (and the 50th Academy Awards, where they went on to win a bunch of Oscars), and is obviously a Who's Who in the special effects field. Cameos (if that's the right word) of Ben Burtt, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Joe Johnston, Dennis Murren (with hair!) and the rest of the original crew. (And yes, read my friggin' book, or any of a number of good Star Wars histories, if you want to get some more context!)



I think the most interesting parts are just seeing them working, and probably the sense that no one had a clue of the historical magnitude of what they were all contributing to. It's simultaneously silly and of historical value. Certainly worth a look for any true Star Wars fan.

Cannot be embedded. Here's the link. 5757, a peek inside ILM.

Really Cool Video

Nothing in any of my books could ever explain how to do this...

Droidmaker FAQ

Strange when you end up with new attention for projects that were on your plate a few years ago. Actors have that when they are out pimping their movies. It's not always obvious, but they are promoting work they did months or sometimes years earlier. And they are often working on some other movie while they're talking excitedly about last years production.

But i've recently received a few emails about DROIDMAKER things and I thought i'd just post a couple quick general answers. I'll paraphrase the questions, and try to be on point.

1. Why did you write DROIDMAKER?
Actually, I had a reasonable answer in this interview at Unidentifed Sound Object. The shortest answer is - I thought someone else would, but they never did. And it seemed like time.

2. What does "George" think of this book?
It is my understanding that Lucasfilm feels like I did a good job, and while there are decisions i made and things included that they would have preferred i not, in all, I think they're okay with it.

If this sounds like I'm dodging the question, i'm not -- but it does demand a bit of background. In researching this book, almost no one currently employed by Pixar (and no former executives of Lucasfilm) were willing to go on record and cooperate, as much as they wanted to, if I didn't have the blessing of Lucasfilm at some level. Lucasfilm, for their part, almost never cooperates with outside projects like this, and as of 2004 had been denying journalists access to Lucas for eons. I had a challenging pitch: I wanted Lucasfilm's cooperation, and I wanted to interview George, but I wasn't willing to give them access to my work. Needlesstosay they were all exceptionally uncomfortable with this deal. In the end, and not without some degree of discussion, George agreed with me: for the book to have any journalistic integrity, Lucasfilm not only couldn't publish it (they asked) but they couldn't have any say-so about the content. The company cooperated in unprecedented ways, and the people I interviewed came out from every corner to share. Lucasfilm was the picture of transparency and without that this detail and accuracy would not have been possible.

But there was a down side to this openness: Lucasfilm would do nothing to promote or endorse the book. Even acknowledging its existence would be a kind of tacit endorsement. I wasn't allowed to present at the Star Wars fan events, and none of the company-owned websites (e.g. starwars.com) were willing to review or comment or alert the millions of fans. And ultimately, George himself would never comment - because whether he liked it or not, that too would be seen as endorsing something, and attract attention. Thus: they have privately confided that I did a fine job, but neither George nor the company will go on record. One has to understand they have numerous complicated rights agreements, where even a single image sometimes has enormous financial strings, targeted market segments, and so on. Promoting my book might expose them with regard to others who have paid for certain content rights.

Anyway, most of this is in the past and I think the academic and historical merit of the book have become evident, and the b&w low rez images in the text don't pose a real threat at this point.

So -- I have no idea what George thinks of the book. But i can't imagine he doesn't like it. I'm pretty sure all the Pixar guys feel good about this (I was met warmly when I presented it at a big event at Pixar in 2006).

3. Am I still touring and giving presentations?
Yes and no. I did a hectic 20 city tour back in 2005-06, but since then I only give a few presentations each year, usually to larger groups: at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, at Yahoo!, at the Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley, at the VIEW Conference on computer graphics in Turin Italy... and yes, if you have a cool group and you'd like me to come present, I'm told it's an entertaining talk -- send me an email or leave a note and we'll see if we can work something out.

4. Did I work on Star Wars?
No. I am not sure why this comes up so much. No, I was 13 years old when the original Star Wars movie released, and I was neither a technical advisor nor an expert on anything at that point. And I didn't work on the prequels either. I have friends who did, but not me. But it's true that Lucasfilm launched my career in film, and was responsible for my subsequent status as an "expert" on digital video and editing.