Saw "Up"

Before I left the US last week, I saw Up in 3D at the Sundance Kabuki. It was awesome. That said, I now understand this post much better (warning: language and lots of it).

Awesome interface at SIGGRAPH 2009

I just tried this about an hour ago, and it's totally awesome (and a little bit freaky):

I know it's popular in America but still...

...the sign in Dallas airport that said, "Y'all roll on in for some Fresh Sushi!" still surprised me.

...fresh sushi in Dallas comes from where exactly?

Best Web UI Feature ever

Yelp totally takes the cake for my favorite little bit of Web UI. In their site, they have a map widget in the right-hand column which autoscrolls to stay on the screen. I always find these autoscrolling web widgets annoying -- they slow down the page, and make the UI jumpy. Apparently I'm not alone, because Yelp's widget has a special checkbox on it:



Now that is appropriate UI text!

Discussion about 3D tool development and mainstream development

In the course of a discussion on a SIGGRAPH alias about something else (Plone), someone asked the question below, and my response got kind of long. While I'm sure most people's eyes will simply glaze over (a perfectly justifiable response), it reminded me of many a Sunday morning conversation on a ridgetop above Marin, so I'm forwarding here.

------------------------

Gustavo's question:

This is Gustavo, I am working on the migration to Plone 3. Quick question, reading your post I found this line quite intriguing:

"develop web apps in Django all day at this point -- computer animation pipeline programming is converging with mainstream development frighteningly quickly"

I am quite intrigued about that, what sort of applications are you talking about? Do you have any pointers or links to pages that talk about it? I am really interested on it

Thanks,

Gustavo

---------------------
My answer:

Hi Gustavo,

Sure, here's what I was referring to. None of it is exactly public, so I can't point you to web pages or anything, but it's not exactly secret either.

The previous generation of CG pipeline tools was largely implemented inside of the DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools (Maya, Max, XSi, Modo, etc.). Those tools all have pretty robust scripting environments nowadays, so you can implement tools in some high-level scripting language with some UI toolkit available to you. And I mean, really pretty robust environments -- we use Django as a object-relational mapper for our code that runs in Python inside of Maya.

That's all good, but when you think about it, that's fundamentally implementing tools in the client/server approach that dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. Those tools (including what Polygon was using up until this year, and the tools I implemented at EA before that):

• connect to the data source via a LAN connection
  
• use a storage-level protocol (usually SQL supplemented by file system access via CIFS/NFS)
  
• require that the code be propagated out to the client machine

For sure there are huge advantages to the DCC integration, and it's still what I recommend for artist-facing tools. However, it has some problems that are becoming especially apparent as the computer animation production world becomes more outsourced and more collaboration-oriented:

• the storage-level protocols are inappropriate to extend outside the company (you don't expose your MySQL or Samba/NFS server to the public net these days)
  
• for a lot of the legitimate stakeholders in your project (notably project managers) the Maya interface is not a preferred means of use
  
• updates to the code require that the updated code be pushed to the clients
  
• those tools are not well-connected to the rest of the computing environment -- notably Excel. Getting data in or out required custom development in every case
  
• the tools are very dependent on the client OS/environment

So, increasingly, we're putting a lot (not all) of our tools into a web-facing mode. While the files themselves are still saved via the standard Maya interface, we're moving our status-tracking apps (that keep track of the status of every model, animation, and rendered shot) to be web-facing. This means:

• extending the app to be accessible from other companies is straightforward -- the security model for web-facing applications is very well-understood
  
• you get to use modern development tools. There's nothing running inside any DCC that compares to the productivity of developing with Django/Ruby on Rails/ASP.NET inside Kodomo/Eclipse/Visual Studio
  
• users have a lot more ad hoc means of data integration (when we haven't had time to code a custom query report for you, just copy-and-paste out of the HTML table into Excel)
  
• apart from that, it's easy to integrate with community software (wiki/forum/etc) to pick up the benefits thereof
  
• printing, etc. is free (I've never seen an in-Maya application that supported printing)
  
• we're out of the software installation business, notably including not caring whether you run Windows or Mac OS X or Linux (different studios have different answers), which version of those OSes you're running, and largely not caring even which version of Maya you run

In a CG production environment, web-facing apps still have some drawbacks, notably:

• you cannot send the actual 3D data over http -- it's just too heavy (a few hundred megabytes for a set is not unusual). So the metadata travels over http but the actual data can't
  
• UI development on the web is harder than locally (IMHO)
  
• in return for getting out of the software installation business, we have to deal with the browser wars. If it wasn't for toolkits like jQuery or YUI, it almost wouldn't be viable to do this

What made me comment on the convergence of application development is that most of the above comments (maybe absent the data volume) apply to almost any kind of custom tool development. I'm very firmly convinced that except for very data-heavy applications (video, 3D scenes) web-facing application development is a huge win.

Regarding the data-heavy stuff, we did something I think is pretty interesting this year. When you have multiple companies participating in CG production, you have to share the model assets, and as I said, those are fundamentally heavy, so you won't be uploading them over http. The traditional solution to this is production managers doing a lot of FTP or running around carrying hard drives between locations; the high-end solutions (which we couldn't afford) are the companies that sell you high-bandwidth shared workspaces that you can use online.

I implemented an interesting solution this year for version control of these massive data assets -- it's like a hybrid between CVS and git. There's a shared server holding the assets (accessible via SFTP) and a web-facing status-tracking application. It's like CVS in the sense that checkout is a global operation -- to be able to edit an asset, you need to check it out on the global web-facing database, either via the web interface or via a web services call from the in-DCC tool. However, it's like git in that the actual asset is assumed to take considerable time to propagate from the committing party to all parties. The artist uses an in-Maya tool to actually check in; that tool both copies the asset to the local file server, and updates the checked-out status on the global web-facing database. Then, it kicks off an asynchronous transfer of the asset data from the local file server to the shared SFTP server. Thus, while the metadata about checkin is instantly propagated via the central server, the actual asset transfer happens later. In the current implementation, downloading from the central server to the local file server is a periodic task kicked off once a day at each company. Of course, the checkout tool enforces the constraint that you can't check out an asset unless your local file server currently holds the version known to be the latest version, and no one else has that asset checked out on the central web-facing server.

Implementation-wise, by making some assumptions about the directory structure, we created a protocol that is atomic for both upload and download even when using nothing but standard FTP operations.

Again, putting this on the public internet is very straightforward: you're only dealing with http and SFTP security (we didn't even bother to use https although it wouldn't affect the architecture at all obviously). For the same reason, you can deploy this on any generic web server, it doesn't take a fussy installation or full virtual server -- just Apache and SFTP. For users, all of their file reads/writes are happening to the local file server, so they get a very high level of service. It uses a lot of disk storage -- but that's the cheapest element of the equation these days.

Sorry, that's probably way more answer than you wanted!

Take care Gustavo,

Leo

From some poking around I did for work: Animation Feature Market 2009

All data from public sources as cited.

Digital Animation Feature Film U.S. Box Office Revenue (and Market Share) by Year
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/ProductionMethods/DigitalAnimation.php

Note that 2009 is incomplete.

• 2005 $553M
  
• 2006 $1,082M
  
• 2007 $1,179M
  
• 2008 $1,032M
  
• 2009 $463M
  

If I try to make an estimate for 2009 overall, it looks like it's going to be about the same as last year:

• Monster vs. Aliens $195M (actual)
  
• Coraline $75M (actual)
  
• Up $300M (actual $263M to date)
  
• Bolt (released in 2008) $4M (actual)
  
• The Battle for Terra $1M (actual)
  
• The Tale of Despereaux $7M (actual)
  
• Ice Age 3 $170M (actual $68M in first weekend)
  
• Ponyo $10M
  
• Sita Sings the Blues $2M
  
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs $100M
  
• 9 $20M
  
• Fantastic Mr. Fox $30M
  
• Astro Boy $60M
  
• Planet 51 $35M
  
• The Princess and the Frog $100M
  
• Total $1109M
  

Traditional animation is excluded from the above but is trivially small. Admittedley, Coraline's category is open to interpretation.

There's really nothing there that would allow one to analyze the effect of 3D screens across the whole market, but for individual films it appears to generate the majority of their revenue. Here are some quotes from www.boxofficemojo.com about some particular films and weekends:

Coraline conjured $18.9 million over the four-day weekend... Coraline's 3D gross was down only seven percent, accounting for an estimated $14 million of the four-day weekend at 1,060 sites. The tally stands at $39.1 million in eleven days, around 72 percent of which coming from 3D presentations. [February 17]

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs gathered $67.5 million in five days (55 percent of which from 1,606 3D venues). [July 5]

... with the release of Up. The adventure comedy swooped in with a $68.1 million start... the [3D] format accounted for $35.4 million of Up's gross. [June 1]

Animated Features Released to Theatres in the United States

by Jerry Beck (well-known animation historian)

• 2005 11 films
  
• 2006 21 films
  
• 2007 13 films
  
• 2008 20 films
  
• 2009 13 films known at this point (includes anticipated releases for remainder of year)

from http://www.cartoonresearch.com/movies2005.html.

• 12:20 Today is the last day for SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Computer Animation Festival submissions... watching the counts, answering emails... #

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Great Optical Illusion (courtesy of GMSV)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/24/the-blue-and-the-green/

Great Product Ideas on YouTube

If you've ever had to deal with British standard plugs, you will apprecitate this a lot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6DvjKkGT6s

Awesome - Become a Socialist Hero

Have your face painted into a Chinese propaganda poster

Not sure what I think about commissioning all these Chinese art school grads to paint the posters. But the idea is awesome!

Many people wonder what it's like in the Japanese animation industry. While in the 3D part of the industry, where I work, things are slightly better, in general it's quite different from the impression westerners have of working conditions at Pixar or DreamWorks.

A recent Harvard Business School report focused on innovation in Japanese companies looks at three case studies: packaged software, mobile phones, and animation. Their comments about the animation industry are devastating, and accurate. Here are a few select pull quotes, but it's well worth downloading the original from their website to read for yourself.

The Japanese anime market was worth ¥234 billion (approximately $2.3 billiion) in 2005 in revenues.

That is to say, the entire anime market in 2005 was smaller than the revenues of Uniqlo, a single Japanese clothing retailer. Anime revenues have been slowly shrinking, so in 2009 the comparison wouldn't even be close.

Toei Animation, the largest animation production company in Japan, had revenue of only ¥21 billion ($175 million). Whereas Disney and Pixar spend in excess of ¥10 billion to produce one anime movie; Japanese anime production companies’ average budget is ¥0.2-0.3 billion (Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli is an exception: it invests ¥1-3 billion in one production). And while Japanese animes are omnipresent in global markets, Japanese anime production companies have virtually no international business presence.

Death of Newspapers, cont'd

More good (if somewhat rant-y) words on the newspaper industry's accelerating their own decline:

The Newspaper Suicide Pact

The Great Japan Beer Festival

I think Japanese beers taste just fine (especially with Japanese food), but they all taste virtually identical -- light lagers. Since I came to Japan, I've been on the lookout for more interesting beers comparable to American craft or microbrews.

It helped a lot when I found Ushi Tora in Shomikitazawa, which always has 17 microbrews on tap, many of them Japanese product. It turns out that although craft brewing started late in Japan, it has given rise to quite a number of local breweries. Those breweries came to show off their product at The Great Japan Beer Festival.

The festival format is that you pay a fixed fee to get in, receive a small memorial glass, and are then free to sample as much beer as you like. The event lasts four hours, so if you get there early your stomach (or alcohol tolerance) will probably run out before the time does.

The Tokyo version was held in the Ebisu Garden Hall (ironically next to the Tokyo headquarters of one of the big three generic breweries) and it was packed -- in fact, the single worst thing about the event was that getting around the hall was brutally difficult. There was a place to buy food from Dean & Deluca up front, but other than that area the lines waiting for sample crossed all the way across the room. I ran into some people from Otaru and some people from Ushi-tora there, and generally had a pleasant couple hours before wandering back down the hill to home (fortunately the event is held ten minutes' walk from my house!).

I had quite a few tiny glasses of beer, but the best beers I tasted today were:

• いわて蔵ビール / Iwate Zou Beer's IPA
  
• From Gotenba Kogen Beer (御殿場高原ビール), both the IPA and the Aijiwai Ale
  
• and the big winner,
  
• 箕面ビール / Minoh Beer's W-IPA: this was a "real ale", a phrase used in Japan for hand-pumped beers. It was delish!
  

Fantastic Photography Exhibit

From now through July 5, 2009 there's an exhibit called "Press Photographer's Story" at the Tokyo Museum of Photography in Ebisu. It's a great show featuring 5 photgraphers who were all associated with the Asahi Shimbun during their professional careers. Most of the photographers worked during the Speed Reflex era, when press cameras were giant boxlike objects that openly stated the profession of the holder, and that's spirit of the exhibition.

Kouyou Kageyama / 影山　光洋 is the first photographer featured. He worked starting in the militaristic era of the 1930s, but he photographed his family constantly -- he was clearly paving the way for Craig Gilbert and An American Family a few decades later. However, his story is especially poignant as his third son lived only five years, and he collected the photographs taken over this time into a photo album called "Life with Yo-chan", excerpts from which were some of the most powerful photographs in the show.

Gen Ootsuka / 大束　元 is a contemporary of Kouyou's and the second featured photographer. He was heavily influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and would eventually organize the first shows of Bresson's work in Japan, as well as taking several famous shots in which Bresson appears. Despite the emphasis on the moment of the photo you would expect, his photographs are amazingly well-composed; balance, perspective and focus all coinciding with the perfect moment.

The postwar political photography of Senzou Yoshioka / 吉岡　専造, the 'photographs from high places' of Katsu Funayama / 船山　克, and the striking Vietnam War photography of Keiichi Akimoto 秋本　啓一 comprise the rest of the featured work. As a final section, the Asahi Shimbun archives yielded up a trove of photographs from the Japanese War in China in the 1930s, as well as the paper's coverage of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

The exhibit is only 500 yen and takes an hour or two depending on your interest level. It's well worth it and recommended for all.

These are the Good Old Days

In discussions of movies, I frequently take the usually-unpopular point of view that the era since I've been in the business (roughly since 1995) have been a relatively good era for movie in general. I was reminded about this today because I noticed that in the current weekend's Top 10 Box Office there are 3 movies rated higher than 90% on Rotten Tomatoes:

• Up, 98%


• Star Trek, 95%


• Drag Me to Hell, at "only" 94%

I can't remember the last time that happened.

Usually, people respond with some variation of, "Oh, they made so many more great movies back in the 30s/40s/50s" (perhaps so, although I'd still dispute whether the number of great films per year was really higher: now we're operating from the benefit of picking things over) or more commonly, "But most films are such crap!" That is true, but in fact most films were always crap: Hollywood made a lot of movies back in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1937 Hollywood released 778 movies, a number that's never been equaled.

In particular, for animation I don't believe there has ever been a 20-year period to correspond to the time from 1989 to now. Not only does that include everything in the Disney revival (Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc.) and the entire Pixar oeuvre, we get Henry Selick/Tim Burton, Wallace and Gromit, and occasional winners like Kung Fu Panda thrown in as well. Seriously, enjoy the bounty!

P.S. Very interesting statistics page on Wayne Schmidt's Box Office Page.