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When word got around that  I was retiring from ILM a number of folks said I should write a book because I have so many stories.  I started to get notes together of the 163 projects I worked on over the years at ILM and realized it was going to take a while and by the time I finished I’m not sure anyone would remember who I was.  So I’ve decided to just make it a blog so I could start feeding out the memories in smaller chunks. 

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One of my problems in retirement is that I don’t have anyone from Production to tell me what to do each day so I’ve been a bit lax getting this going.  My intent now is to post at least one thing a week. Not all the projects have interesting stories so you aren’t looking at 3 plus years to get this done. When we were working on “The Doors” movie, Robby Krieger (the Doors’ guitarist) was around a bit. The movie was pretty Jim Morrison centric and at some point Michael Owens (the VFX Supe for the movie) asked Robby if it bothered him that they weren’t telling more of the story of the other band members. He very graciously responded “ The Doors had a lot of stories. This one is just Jim’s.”  In that spirit I’m not putting this out there as a definitive history of ILM, just my stories for my friends.  I’m grabbing images from where I can to help tell the story.

 

I could go down a technical rabbit hole with a lot of the work I did because of my role but I will try to keep those discussion at an “Executive Level”. That was what was requested when we used to put together presentations for the Board meetings George used to have to explain both the artistic and technical details of what we were working on.  The Board members were business folks that George chose to help him make decisions about the company not nerds or artists so we’d need to dumb down the explanations so their eyes wouldn’t glaze over. For example in 1987 I was asked to come up with some  notes about the MC Optical Printer which was a big technical deal at the time.  

 

I might have said, “Regarding its repeatability of camera motion control movements. It was accurate to .0001 of an inch due to the precise integration of the drivers of the stepper motors and the physical perfection of the various linear accelerators mounted on the stationary base with a proper mix of alloys and the integrated spreadsheet software that drove the motors. This allows us to do repeatable moving passes as we construct the final composite images you see on the screen.”  

 

But none of that would have made sense to them. 

 

So the “Executive Level” note I sent along was 

• Normally Optical Printers don’t move. 

• This one does which allows for expanded creative concepts and technical fixes.

•  It is accurate to .0001 of an inch. To put that in perspective, if I threw a baseball with the same accuracy from here in SF I could hit the Empire State Building in NYC. Then if I threw another one I would hit it again.”  

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I am going to start now when I walked in the door at ILM. If you want to see how I got to ILM go to the ABOUT section where I have a somewhat edited version of my life up to this point. 

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