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.

Flat Out the Coolest Flash Site I Have Ever Seen

http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

It doesn't just enable interactive play, it demands that you play with it. Anyone with an interest in music+interactivity should go experience it now (you may have seen it, looks like its been around since November).

As much as I love the site above, the site of the company that made it, HerraizSoto & Co., shows exactly why I hate Flash. Non-standard UI for no reason, inscrutable navigation, overly clever. But maybe if they keep producing things like the above once in a while...

Design Festa Link Roll

Here's a few links/images for artists I saw at Design Festa today. I'll say that at least all these folks had something interesting enough to make me stop and chat a minute!

Unfortunately, the absolute coolest thing I saw at Design Festa I couldn't get a meishi from (there was no one at the booth and I didn't want to take their one and only remaining meishi). It was a piece with two aquariums that had various pumps in them creating currents in the water. Then, they put these "sea creatures" (I think they were made of strips of rubber folded and attached to themselves to look like fantastical jellyfish) in the aquarium, and as they got pushed around by the water it completely looked like they were living creatures.

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

O ½

Debo Factory

闇月創房 / Yamitsuki Soubou (cool handcrafted metal jewelry)

From DesignFesta2008

Hell's Kitchen (I really appreciated this woman because gave me a cool little fan which amused numerous other exhibitors throughout the day. Unfortunately, the website doesn't seem to be working)

Moscow Kogei handmade Very cool highly articulated little wooden animals. The limbs are mostly attached with elastic bands so you can pose them up!

From DesignFesta2008

村上　萌 / Moe Murakami (very ironic that her name is Moe)alternate site

川室　鷹嶺 / Kawamuro Takane

Yorke

Microu

ミつの森のサーカス / Mitsu no Mori no Saakasu (lit. Three Forests Circus) event at Shimokitazawa's Space Sprout 17-22Sep

The ever-trusty B-Side Label from Osaka, my main source of stickers. Their stickers come with a two-year guarantee (to do what, stick?).

ミカジキ / Mikajiki Girlspunk Illustrator

Tosakamania

Dynabite

illustrator INAZUMA

Tyabo "One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests"

Roomscape Order-made furniture

Mitchy Castle

yuuki kikuchi (jojo)

O Project / Ruins Anthem Like the Land's End magazine I found last year, this is a project that goes around taking pictures of ruined and abandoned place in Japan. Totally fascinating, I got their special issue on 軍艦島 / Gunkannjima

がんばれコーポレーション (lit. Going All Out, Inc.) These guys were actually giving away DVDs of their latest video project, which even given the non-profit nature of most things at Design Festa was pretty impressive.

OXOXO "The inifinite creativity in oxoxo toybox"

VIRUS presents Gray Zone A group of seven friends who produce experiential art, alternate link

坂本　道夫 / Michio Sakamoto Totally, totally cool insects made by cutting and folding a single sheet of paper with no tape/tabs/etc

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

mofuwa She cut every one of her business cards out by hand (they have a series of scallops in one corner)!

Coffe Brown Design Stars The only way to explain it is that, it's coffee art.

marco

Cavity vol. 03 Event in Aoyama 21Jun with various live art etc.

Interest Rates, Koushin, and Japanese Place Names

While the bursting of the real estate bubble is helping Americans rethink attitudes to real estate, I've wanted to write for awhile about the weird approach to real estate in Japan, how it's enabled by interest rates, and how it influences place names here (honest).

The image of many famous cities is associated with their traditional housing stock. Whether the sturdy brick buildings of Dublin, the mansard roofs of Paris, or the Victorians of San Francisco, traditional housing has a big influence on the ambience of a city.

Except here in Tokyo. When you first come to Tokyo you're impressed with the skyscrapers, subways, and the occasional truly idiosyncratic building, but if you actually go out looking for apartments here, like I did two years ago, you'll find the strangest thing: there is no such thing as housing more than about 25 years old. This is really not an exaggeration: my building was built in 1988 and is thus considered "old".

This isn't limited to housing: hotels, office buildings, factories, and so on are all torn down and rebuilt about every 20-25 years. The word they use for this is koushin 更新, which means 'renewal'. Interestingly, that same word is also used for updating software or for replacing the display in a department store.

Of course, I find this kind of sad: I like classic old housing, that's why I own a San Francisco Victorian. But after looking around awhile, I realized that sort of thing just isn't an option in Tokyo: either you get recent high-rise precast-concrete construction, or recent poorly insulated, noisy low-rise wooden construction. As much as I had visions of a wonderful Japanese-style apartment, I opted for the high-rise.

But apart from my emotional reaction, it seemed frighteningly inefficient to me: why in the world would you tear down a perfectly good 25-year-old building, and replace it with essentially the same thing? Right now the former Motorola office building down the street from our office is in the midst of being koushin-ed. They tore down the old 7-story office building, cleared the site, and are now building a new 7-story office building. This is quite normal for koushin: whereas in America we might think of tearing something down and building a bigger, taller building on the site, it's quite normal in Japan to tear down a building and build a new building of about the same size. It's just newer.

The builders will say this is because Japanese prefer new construction. Of course, most people in most countries prefer new construction: the question to me was, why is it pervasive here? The key answer lay in interest rates, combined with demographics.

Japan, as everyone has heard, is a very savings-intensive nation. Because of that, interest rates here have been lower than America for many decades, but it became even more true after the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in around 1990. Since then, the BOJ interest rates (the equivalent of Federal Reserve rates) have been around 0%. Even at the retail level, a normal home mortgage goes for 2-2.5%. In other words, if you can manage to qualify for a mortgage loan here, you won't pay much on it.

Secondly, the population of Japan is actually shrinking. Although the Japanese are very long-lived, the birthrate here is very low (second-lowest after Italy). The birthrate has finally caught up to the longevity, and each year there are fewer Japanese than the year before. Combine this with the fact that Japan does not permit large-scale permanent immigration, and you realize that the aggregate demand for real estate is also falling. This weak demand is most pronounced in rural areas, where real estate is becoming almost valueless, but it's true everywhere.

As you would expect given declining demand for something, that means long-term prices are weakening. Even in Greater Tokyo, the long-term expectation for the growth in value of a piece of real estate is zero. That is, if you've done well, 20 years from now your house or apartment will be worth the same as what you paid for it. If you're unlucky, it'll go down -- my boss lost 30% of his equity on the first apartment he ever owned.

What does this combination of low interest rates and long-term declining real estate prices mean? Well, first of all, it means you have no incentive to view real estate as in investment. You buy real estate to lower your rent (if an individual) or for the sake of the rental cash flow (if an investor). Either way, you look at real estate purely from a cash-flow point of view.

Secondly, Tokyo is famous for real estate being expensive. But mostly what's expensive here is land. The underlying land parcel for a building is expensive, but the building on it isn't considered to be worth much. Why? Well, it's a depreciating asset since everyone wants new construction.

So here's how that all connects to the koushin phenomenon. Let's say you're the owner of a 25-year-old apartment building. It's considered kind of drab, so you're not getting the highest rents in the neighborhood. Let's say the land is assessed at about $10M US, and the building at U$5M. If you've done a good job of marketing, our building is covered its expenses, meaning your getting about U$1M per year in total rent. Here's what the breakdown looks like for koushin vs. not koushin:

Don't rebuild: Your rents continue to slowly decline. You have no new capital expenditure to put in, though.

Rebuild: You have to borrow U$5M to build a new building, but at 2%, that only costs you U$100,000 per year. However, because your building will then be brand new, you can charge among the highest rents in the neighborhood.

So in other words, if spending U$5M to renew the building means you can increase your rents by 10%, it's a good economic deal for you. Given the prediliction of Japanese for new construction, I think 10% is way conservative: new construction easily commands a 20-30% premium here, I think.

But isn't there a third alternative? In America, the owner often choose to remodel: give the building a new lobby, replace all the elevators, repaint the walls. Why isn't that a good option? Well, let's say we could remodel for $1M. That would only then increase interest costs by U$20,000 per year, meaning you only need to justify a 2% rent increase. That's also economically compelling, but the question is, why do that when you could just rebuild? They're both a lot of trouble, and the rebuilding option can get you much higher rents.

For single-family houses, the only thing different from the above analysis is the timing. Most people don't tear down and rebuild their house while they're living in it. However, when the original family moves out, the same tradeoffs apply: a builder can buy the old house, raze it, build a new one, and get a higher price than simply reselling the existing house. Because most of the cost of buying a piece of property is tied up in the value of the land, not the structure, so rebuilding the house just isn't that big a deal economically.

So the unholy combination of declining real estate prices, low interest rates, and a market that prefers new construction (combined with the utter lack of historical preservation or zoning laws -- neither of which exist here) results in the total teardown and rebuilding of everything on the surface of Tokyo every 20-30 years. It's really shocking given how admirably efficient the rest of the society generally is.

And finally, how does this relate to Japanese place names? I noticed when I got here that a huge preponderance of the place names are temples and shrines (and a second major category are the names of elementary, junior high, and high schools). Eventually I realized why: those are the only buildings that aren't torn down regularly. Thus, it makes perfect sense to name a bridge, subway station, or intersection after a shrine, template or occasionally a school: those are the only things you can be sure will still be here in 30 years.