John Underkoffler

Last Friday, a funny-looking guy from Oblong mentioned during his introductory remarks at one of the UCLA Mobile Media symposium's panels a strange bent he'd been noticing among students and practitioners to accept as UI gospel designs emitted by the two major OS manufacturers. What he had no time to go on to say (but should have anyway): the phenomenon isn't ascribable to the individual; it feels, rather, like a pandemic of ingrained assumption -- at the aggregate tech-humanity level -- in which we all of us can't help wallowing.

That assumption is to do with where good UI ideas come from and who gets to have them (the ideas).

The sole dominant (universal, actually) GUI is twenty-five years old, was introduced by one of the incumbents, and was copied by the other as slavishly as law, talent, and pride would allow. Already a problem, no? A monosetup doesn't promote a mental model in which there's evolution, an ecosystem, a dialogue. Because there was no GUI before that, we haven't even had a pattern that suggests "you get a new one every three decades". And yet we should make it our job to assume that, and to assure that, and while we're at it to get itchy every decade. We're currently coming up on twenty years late.

Touchscreens that accommodate multiple points of contact got rediscovered recently. Products involving these modalities have been released -- some of them to commercial success, some of them to PR success -- and this in turn has suddenly launched large-scale public interest in novel interface. The interest is welcome.

The shame, really, is in presupposing that the incumbents have some advantage in designing radically new interfaces. There's certainly reason to expect they'd have an advantage in asserting new interfaces, but that's hardly the same thing. Yet even there it's unsimple: an incumbent has a responsibility (read: fiscal incentive) not to alienate or confuse or discomfit existing customers. So in fact that translates to a formidable disincentive to offer anything too radical.

Enough about them. What we want is encouragement against being discouraged from designing and building freely. Here's an axiom: a new UI that's a vast leap forward must also be sweepingly different. That's not to say that an incrementally different UI couldn't be a swollen commercial triumph. But such swelling is not what we should be after (not all of us, at least). Here's something between an axiom and an assertion: a vast leap forward is possible. The leap's vast, so it won't look like a traditional GUI with some touch stuff layered on. Therefore, we haven't seen it yet.

That ought be all we need to know.

A last part is that a giant incumbent company has about the same chance of being the one to find it as International Business Machines had of inventing and popularizing the GUI: which is to say: greater than zero: and it is also to say: less that one.

Editorial: Craft & Tools, Craft v. Tools.
James Haygood

James Haygood, one of the pre- and post-millenial decades' most respected editors, will discuss editing process, the way in which contemporary tools both influence and impede editorial choices, and the possibility of a new workflow that first enables and then depends on a more explicit integration of editorial activity into the broader production effort.

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JAMES HAYGOOD (Editor) began working with David Fincher in San Francisco in 1985 when Fincher left ILM to direct music videos. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1989, Haygood continued working on music videos with Fincher and other directors, for such artists as Madonna, Aerosmith, Paula Abdul and The Rolling Stones, receiving two MTV Awards, a Clio Award and numerous other industry accolades.

In 1992, Haygood launched Superior Assembly, a commercial editing company, which created TV spots for clients including Nike, Coke, AT&T and Nissan. He left the company in 2001, and now is a partner at Union Editorial in Los Angeles.

In 1997, he edited his first feature film for Fincher on the action thriller “The Game,” and continued his collaboration with the acclaimed director on the hit films “Fight Club” and “Panic Room.” Haygood then worked as an additional editor on “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”; edited six episodes of the HBO series “Unscripted,” for director George Clooney; cut the independent feature “Lies & Alibis,” for directors Kurt Matilla and Matt Chekowski and in 2006 “The Astronaut Farmer” with Michael & Mark Polish. During 2007 and 2008 he edited "Where The Wild Things Are" along with co-editor Eric Zumbrunnen.

Haygood’s upcoming project is the sequel to the 1982 cult classic “Tron”, set for a 2010 release.

VFX: Pipeline, Bottlenecks, Workflow, Process.
John Nelson

John Nelson, accomplished visual effects supervisor of such monumental efforts as Iron Man, Gladiator, and I, Robot, speaks about the role of VFX in modern filmmaking, how the discipline has been integrated into the larger production process, and opportunities for refining elements of the effects workflow.

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John Nelson graduated with high distinction from the University of Michigan in 1976 with a Bachelors in General Studies. After college, he made several films that won awards at film festivals and moved to California in 1979 to work for Robert Abel and Associates, first as a cameraman, then as a technical director and finally as a director. He was nominated for Clio awards six times, winning twice. In 1987, he moved to Germany to help set up the German company Mental Images GMBH. Upon returning to the US John went to work for Industrial Light & Magic where he animated several key scenes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), most notably where the shotgunned head of the chrome terminator re-seals itself.

John VFX supervised Stay Tuned (1992) for Rhythm & Hues Studios, and In the Line of Fire (1993), My Life (1993/I), The Pelican Brief (1993), Wolf (1994), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Judge Dredd (1995), The Cable Guy (1996) and City of Angels (1998) for Sony Pictures Imageworks.

In 1998 Mr. Nelson left Sony to Senior VFX supervise Gladiator (2000) for which he won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects (2001). After K19: The Widowmaker (2002) and the Centropolis sections of The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), Mr. Nelson supervised all the VFX in I, Robot (2004) and Iron Man (2008) both of which were nominated for the Academy Award in Visual Effects. John is currently working on The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010) and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Visual Effects Society, the the International Cinematographers Guild and the Director's Guild of America.

In connection with the general theme of pipeline & workflow reform, Prof. McDowell -- acting as co-chair of the Joint ASC / ADG Technology Committee -- guest-edited three volumes of American Cinematographer, the American Society of Cinematographer's (ASC's) primary journalistic organ. These appeared as Authoring Images in May 2007, August 2007, and March 2008.

With some small difficulty, you can access a kind of archive of these materials online. The site, desperate for your exemplars, encourages you to fill in all sorts of personal information... for some person.

There's great stuff throughout all three -- it's certainly worth looking through and referencing the various case studies -- but please read the transcripts of the Committee's round-table discussions (that's the assignment).

Making Movies is Hard Fun: Building Tools for Telling Stories
Michael B. Johnson, PhD.

Making movies is a complex, collaborative, creative activity. At Pixar, they don't pretend to know exactly what they're doing, but they do have a process. They trust the process, but they constantly test and refine it, based on the stories they want to tell, the resources they have to tell them, and most importantly - the people who want to tell them.

Technology and art go hand in hand at Pixar - each challenges and reinforces the other. Technologist Michael B. Johnson, a Pixarian since he joined as in intern in 1993, has been involved in most of Pixar's feature films and short films. He will share his perspective on the Pixar film-making process; one which involves both creative story tellers that want things they don't understand how to make and flexible technologists who are more concerned with empowering their users than winning an argument with them.

~ ~ ~ Dr. Michael B. Johnson leads the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar Animation Studios. His group is responsible for the design, implementation and support of the pre-production pipeline for Pixar features and shorts. This includes Story, Editorial, Art and the review process. His team works directly with the directors, editors, producers, production designers, art directors, artists and production folks who start the process of bringing Pixar stories to the screen.

Dr. Johnson has been at Pixar since 1993, and has has written tools for all of Pixar's feature films (and many of their short films), including storyboarding, pre-viz, layout, animation, modeling, lighting, rendering, and editorial tools.

Prior to Pixar, Michael attended the University of Illinois where he earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering. He studied abroad for a year in Swansea, Wales and also worked for NCSA, Thinking Machines, IBM and MIT’s Media Lab. He completed his Masters of Science in Visual Studies and his PhD in computer Graphics and Animation at the MIT Media Lab, where Dr. Edwin Catmull (founder of Pixar) was on his thesis committee. He lives in Oakland CA with his wife and daughter.

CTIN 499 is a course about moviemaking and media production; about gestural interface and new technologies that immerse practitioners more completely in the work of creation; about making production profoundly nonlinear, so that its elements are brought into re-entrant contact with each other. And so it's about process: the organizational structures and the flows of effort -- human and technological -- that together shape media production. Film, whose own methodologies are sliding and being pushed sideways from analog to digital, will serve as an anchor for our inquiry, but the workflows that attend animation, interactive media creation, experience design, and game production are the topic no less.

Just abutting film's imminent transformation, human-machine interface is about to slip the bonds of the mouse-based GUI's twenty-five year monopoly. What's next is the spatial operating environment. The SOE's acknowledgment of the embodied, real-world nature of humans and pixels alike enables a new style of interaction: gestural, direct, as expressive as hands must be allowed to be.

In this project-centered course, then, we'll survey present-day workflows (with frequent guest-addresses from industry domain experts) and so form an understanding of where and how and by what forces true nonlinear production is currently impeded. In parallel, student teams will undertake three comprehensive tool-building projects. Each team will focus on one particular production domain in order to (1) conceptualize and storyboard a new tool or toolset; (2) author a proof-of-concept video 'simulation' of the tool; and finally (3) construct a working, interactive prototype of the tool atop the g-speak SOE.

By year end, the three-project packages from the class's teams should provide a compelling glimpse of future production workflow.

[ instructors: alex mcdowell & john underkoffler; syllabus; flower street annex location; schedule: tuesdays 6-8.45p ]

It's not wholly clear whether the syllabus for CTIN499 -- Immersive Moviemaking: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design -- is showing up on blackboard.usc.edu, to all eyes, the way it's supposed to.

So (and in any event) here it is locally loitering.

Note too that the class does not meet in Zemeckis, as suggested by certain devious publications, but rather in the Flower Street Annex.

Until Tuesday night at 6p...

                                                                - john & alex