Hangin’ at ILM

img_3159.jpg

The ILM filming was brilliant, we spent most of the day there, and we were made so welcome.

A few things we got to do apart from film the interview – some I can share – others we can’t right now… but one was we saw a screening in the Premier Cinema. This is a digital 2K projector cinema – that has to be seen – and hear – to be believed. It was amazing – one of the best cinemas I have ever been in… the colours – the clarity – the image stablity. Even in shots I had seen before – I was seeing detail and aspects I had never noticed. This is where dailies are shown. When we spoke to the animators and artists about this, we discovered that not only can a supervisor or director step frame by frame – but the darn thing has a zoom knob – so doing dailies your work can be zoomed up… this is great – but think about it – you are seeing stuff that really 99.99% of the movie public will never see… wow – that is a real quality hurdle to be jumped each day.

We also met up with quite a few old friends who work there, and a few fxphd students ! One who had already emailed us to say “thanks again for such a great site, I never used Shake before ILM and fxphd.com got me up to speed in record time. ” A foundation fxphd Post-grad, he had applied to work at ILM but had not used Shake – and used fxphd to learn Shake – he now works on Pirates 3 and Transformers comping using Shake!

One other thing we observed is just how artist friendly ILM seemed to be, – the grounds – the child care – just the general working conditions all seemed very artist respectful. I have to say if you thought ILM was stand off-ish or unapproachable – we found them warm, open to serious technical discussions and down right great guys who were just friendly! I think one can forget just how important it is to foster a collabrative environment and in talking, as we did, to people from entry level compositors to 15 year senior ILM veterans – they all appeared collaborative and very open.

We will publish the class soon. But our thanks to ILM for such a great day.

Mike
Let me know and I can post some more happy snaps from our day there if you like…