This Thursday at the Grand Event Center, the Long Beach Community Foundation is hosting their 4th Annual Digital Media Arts Summit and Expo. The event blends professional networking opportunities and talks by leaders from various technology driven companies. This year, the keynote speaker is Brian M. Rosen, Software Engineer for Pixar Animation Studios. More on him in just a moment.
For the last three years the event was free, but not open to the public. It was invitation only. Jim Worsham, President and CEO of LBCF, explained that, this year, for the very first time, they’re charging a $20 admission ($10 if you’re a student) because the event’s primary underwriter, the Knight Foundation, wants the event to be self-sustaining. So this exlcusive and little known event is now open to the public.
Rosen joined Pixar just as they were ramping up for their first feature film, Toy Story. He’s seen the company transform itself in profound ways. This, in part, will be the subject of his talk at the Summit.
“I was going to talk about creating a company that truly fosters creativity,” he said, “as well as how our software development had to track our growth. [We made] a gradual shift from a company of generalists to more specialists, and I’ll share how technology facilitated that.
“For Toy Story, a great many of the tech staff worked in ALL the departments. I personally worked in lighting, shading, modeling, and effects. Now, it’s relatively rare for people to move departments. Back then, the Technical Directors were all experts in ‘computer graphics,’ a field we were still defining. Then, over time, the roles striated. People showed a proclivity for different aspects of the pipeline.
“More and more people have specialized talents. That’s part of what allowed us to grow. As the industry has matured, there are more people who have developed an eye for lighting, but don’t necessarily have an understanding of the complexities of a rendering system. We’ve been able to build software that hides the harder problems of computer graphics, the underlying math, and just lets users think visually and artistically. As John Lasseter [Chief Creative Officer at Pixar] is fond of saying, technology inspires the art and the art challenges the technology. We had to develop the tools in such a way that the various tasks involved in making a CG movie could be performed by people without PhDs in computer science!”
Computer animation involves the creation of three dimentional models, where each component has physical properties that align with the real world. For example, a character’s hair, in order to look natural, must obey the same rules we’re used to seeing in the real world. Each hair must flex a bit, have weight, and exhibit both independance from and adhesion to adjacent hairs. Also, each surface is modeled to absorb, refract, and reflect light in a realistic way.
The human brain has the uncanny ability to instantly recognize any ‘falseness,’ so programmers like Rosen work very hard to develop systems that trick the brain. As computer processors have advanced, modeling systems have been able to create far more complex, subtle, and realistic renderings.
“The hair and cloth on Brave is far and above the most complex and gorgeous we’ve ever done. We used to think that Sullivan from Monsters Inc was a big deal, but Merida is essentially an entire character with Sullivan on her head! There’s just a lot of hair! And not just hair, but really kinky and curly hair that interacts with itself. And you can’t animate that by hand! You need to do a simulation so, based on the motion of her head, the computer will try to figure out what the hair would do. But it rarely comes out of the computer just right, so we have to tweak and adjust the solution so it both looks physically accurate, and aesthetically appealing.”
Prior to joining Pixar, Rosen had been pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering at Princeton.
“When I saw what the guys in the Computer Science department were doing I was immediately smitten. I switched departments and concentrated on computer graphics. As soon as I saw the Pixar short films I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I called them up in 1992 and got an interview, and I was one of the early hires for Toy Story.”
Princeton is also the origin of Rosen’s other big passion, music. He’s an accomplished composer, songwriter, and singer.
“I was the Music Director of the Princeton Footnotes a cappella group and, when I came to Pixar, I started the Pixar singers. The Pixar Singers have become a sort of institution. I write a spoof song for each film, and we perform it for the whole company at a party before the first screening of the movie. We had 5 people for the 1994 Christmas party and then, in 1995, someone thought it would be fun to do a spoof song before the screening of Toy Story. There were about 15 of us then. It was a big hit. Then, it was just sort of a given that we’d do a song for each movie.” Despite pleading on my part to hear them, Rosen insists that these songs are for internal consumption.
Rosen is also part of another, more public, a cappella group, The Richter Scales.
“We’re a group of mostly tech professionals. We had a viral hit with ‘Here Comes Another Bubble‘ 5 years ago. We won a webby award for it. It’s been a great outlet for songwriting for me, but it’s primarily recreational. At some point I was hoping we might be able to go on the occasional tour, but everyone has their very demanding jobs and kids and stuff, so we just rehearse once a week and have the occasional gig.”
Rosen composed an ambitious musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, commissioned by the Cinnabar Opera Theater in Petaluma, which they performed with their youth theater program but, currently, he’s been focused on completing his one-man opera, Failing That: A Minor Tragedy.
“It’s a story about three characters who all fail catastrophically. There’s a middle school student struggling to do a somersault in gym class, a college student completely unprepared for a final exam, and a self defense instructor who find himself unable to use his skills when he’s mugged. It explores how people deal with failure and how failure affects them in the future. Failure is definitely part of the human condition, and fear of failure is a great limiter.
“It’s kinda like one of the things Ed [Catmull, President of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios] says about managing a creative company: You have to resist the urge to minimize risk, and have faith that the people you’ve assembled will get it right. Minimizing risk is a sure fire way of getting something mediocre.”
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Learn more about Brian’s musical efforts at MusicVsTheater.com.
Learn more about the Long Beach Community Foundation at LongBeachCF.org.
The Summit is taking place at the Grand Event Center, located at 4101 East Willow. Purchase Tickets for the Summit.