The Real Story of Pixar
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like $4k or something, not enough to make any real difference, significantly smaller than the film bonus plans, and on top of that, I never felt like I'd been underpaid or cheated even after this all went public.
Even as an employee, I don't think I ever knew the full story, but the Cartoon Brew articles always struck me as going out of their way to stoke anger and frame things in the most negative possible light, not particularly fair or unbiased.
While I do not in any way intend to defend what Catmull or others did, the fact that not just one but two studios I worked for did close, I've always felt like it is plausible that Catmull truly believed he was doing a good thing for employees in the long term by trying to keep the doors open, and that the threat that they might close was real, that his refusal to apologize was out of genuine belief that he wasn't being selfish. I'm sure it'd be hard to fully buy that if you saw his tax return, but nonetheless is how I still feel when I read these articles again.
Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed.
The film industry didn't die that day - just some bad studios.
I happen to know for a fact that’s not true in either case of the two studios I worked for.
I also don’t particularly appreciate your presumptuous and uninformed conclusion about them being bad studios. Both I worked for were quite good studios, one of them being PDI which made the Shrek & Madagascar movies. No idea to what degree the studios were involved at all, only the parent companies were named. (Edit: actually I’m certain the other studio was not participating in any way, but was still part of the class, being Disney owned. I’ve edited my upper comment to clarify.)
The truth of the CG & VFX industry is that it was always bad margins in the US. Pretty much the whole industry imploded in the US some time after this lawsuit. Not in response to the lawsuit, just because the business is hard to sustain, and subsidies in Canada, Europe, India, and China, has made outsourcing a much bigger part of the picture. The CG film industry hasn’t died exactly, but in the US it’s definitely still on life support.
And I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t feel like the lawsuit really changed salaries either. It was then and is now still true that working in digital entertainment doesn’t pay on average and for entry level employees as well as working in other areas of tech.
A couple years ago I talked to a few of my friends in the 2d animation industry and they were like "all the studios are constantly trying to stretch the job descriptions to get more work out of what's already a punishing workload". It's a brutal business all around, even in their side of things where they actually have a union. There's a lot of people willing to work for peanuts because they get to be part of the magic, including me twenty years ago.
I look from outside and I really dunno if I feel like the broad cg/vfx/animation industry's sustainable. Everything costs so damn much and the field's increasingly crowded, despite it all slowly turning into divisions of Disney competing with itself.
they were abusing their workers rights in a surreptitious manner - not sure how that's a "good studio"
No they weren’t. The C-level staff of the parent companies named as defendants in the lawsuit were, and the parent companies are all still in business. The studios that closed were pawns, just like the employees.
One corp owning another isn't some arbitrary thing, they control that subcorp, are liable for its action, and so forth.
The inverse is true. They're one thing. The separation is only legal, not moral.
I also should have put my last sentence in its own paragraph.
I stand by this, and consider...
You are a CFO of a subsidiary. You have certain legal requirements. Only certain people may speak for your org, be it CxO level, or the board.
If you discover a board member speaking as if it has CxO level authority, or worse, some non-board, or CxO actor running around, claiming to represent your company on financial matters, you must seek and act on that malfeasance. You cannot simply allow someone, with your knowledge, to speak for your corp, without approval.
The board / directors appoint top execs, giving them executive power. No one else may claim it.
So, someone running around, negotiating salary deals, speaking for a subcorp? Very shady, hard to believe it would not get back to the board or that the board or executive branch did not know.
This isn’t logic, it’s history. If you’re interested in commenting on it, why not read something about the actual lawsuit? In this case, specific people were caught making certain agreements that are against the law. The executives did know, because they were the ones making the agreement, and they were caught. People directly involved included Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) and Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google).
Look, many people in this thread have expressed that you seem to be over protective of these studios you worked for. I get that you did not feel ill treated when there, but you were ... clearly your salary was artificially, and illegally depressed.
You just don't have a leg to stand on here, IMO.
I'm not sure why you seem so put out by this. You aren't your employer, and being a victim doesn't paint you in a bad light.
edit: If I am missing something here, please lay out what it is.
But do note that by the mere fact your salary was repressed, you worked for a bad corp. I will find it very, very difficult to get past this point, and all the hand waving in the world will likely not help here.
It may be that there is no value in us discussing, our positions may be too entrenched.
You aren’t entitled to any proof of anything here, and you’ve misunderstood and misrepresented at least some of what I wrote above. I shared my experience and feeling about Cartoon Brew’s articles versus my perspective of what happened as a member of the class. What is your experience in the matter? Were you involved? I hope you keep your healthy skepticism turned on while you read their articles. My position is based on personal experience in the matter, your stated position so far based on pure speculation. You don’t know what my salary was, nor whether it was repressed. Saying you’re entrenched only proves to me you’ve jumped to a conclusion and aren’t interested in the truth. I’m really curious why you’re still responding, but I could not care less what your bystander opinion is, unless you have something relevant to say that is based on reality.
It's important to hold regulators responsible for policing these companies, because otherwise market forces will tend to drag quality-of-life down for employees.
(Whether no-poaching agreements should be considered price-fixing is a separate question, but assuming they are, they must be enforced or the end result is employee harm across the industry, because prices are a function of what the competitor will pay too).
There wasn’t a noticeable reduction in my own quality of life, but that’s not to say others didn’t feel it, nor that it wouldn’t have happened left unchecked, I don’t know.
Once after a movie’s crunch time, I wanted to trade my accumulated overtime bonus for comp time (time off) instead. The studio refused, and I was initially upset but then discovered that in California it was illegal for them to agree to it. The reason is that labor jobs in the past had abused comp time by rewarding employees who were working too much with forced time off in which they weren’t getting paid. This would be awful for farm workers or any labor job, really, and more damaging the lower the pay. I’m happy this law is protecting them even when I didn’t want it applied to me.
“One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic, or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith was feeling attacked or confrontational, he tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was a bully tactic, and I exploded with everything I had,” Smith recalled. ”
“Before I knew it, we were in each other’s faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each other.”
Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly Smith pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!” Jobs shouted. “What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point Jobs stormed out.”
Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. “Steve Jobs.”
If you worked with Steve, you were going to be challenged. If you cowered, gods help you. But if you knew what you were talking about, you'd be fine, in the end he'd respect you more.
www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-michelson/one-lesson-from-steve-job_b_1100331.html
So he was a bully who only targeted those people who wouldn't fight back?
To be clear, I don't idolize Jobs and am not defending toxic behavior by a broken person who either thought the ends justified the means, or (more likely) who didn't think about it at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiopeia_(film)
They had very limited resources and were using commercial tools instead of building their own like Pixar. They cheated by having their characters be aliens who were mostly blobs without legs or arms, though they like to complain about Pixar cheating by having many objects be physical models or sculptures that were then digitized instead of fully designing them in the computer.
They reached the big screen second after Pixar, but even if they had been first I doubt they would have been remembered.
The film was completed much earlier. But distribution company held it for reasons nobody know. /insert business conspiracy theory.
It was very amateur. 3ds-max-4-like program on dos, called topaz (never saw it after that). and render "farms" were just using the animators (486?) computers at night.
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1025067227530362883...
Edit: I could not find similar to here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2018/
https://asciiwwdc.com/2018/sessions/111
The engineer's name is Danielle Feinberg and she did a similar TED talk two years before WWDC (even the titles are similar).
... and that's when he knew they'd succeeded.
My understanding is that the oil and gas industry is pretty heavy needs for scientific computation and data visualization. That's how they discover new places to drill.
Also a quick search found this from 1985: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400...:
> Supercomputers are becoming a useful and important tool in the finding and developing of oil and gas reserves. Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry involve two important aspects: enormous computational power and massive data management. Vector computers are being used in petroleum engineering to simulate the flow of oil and gas in a reservoir, the faster performance of the vector machines making many, heretofore, unmanageable calculations possible. In exploration for oil and gas, supercomputers are being used to store, classify, and interpret huge amounts of geophysical seismic data.
And since we are visual beings, managing large amounts of data is best done in a graphical way. But it is not easy to do that right. You can create super beautiful looking, but total missleading visualisations.
I’m convinced if SV hadn’t happened in SV it would have happened in Dallas or Houston.
Part of what attracted investors and innovators to the bay were the non-compete laws and counter culture of the time.
Schlumberger buying Fairchild, which had FLAIR (Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research), then opening SPAR (Schlumberger Palo Alto Research) and moving FLAIR into that. Also long forgotten CPU-Architecture called
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture
later sold to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph
https://www.slb.com/who-we-are/our-history/1980s
Closing of SPAR, and moving parts of that to Austin.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-18-fi-4498-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Martin_Tenenbaum
Some leftovers, via acquisition of Applicon and Bravo3!VLSI:
https://www.staticfreesoft.com/electricHistory.html
Steven M. Rubin, Computer Aids for VLSI Design https://www.rulabinsky.com/cavd/
That wasn't the first time they'd talked to Jobs either:
> It's probably worth mentioning how Steve Jobs was introduced to (what became) Pixar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687900
> https://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-1...
>> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.
>> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.
> So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.
As a side note, that Stanford link sadly no longer works any more:
> Page Not Found
> Oops! We can't find that page!
> We have a new site and things have moved around a bit. Here are some good places to start.
Oopsie doopsie! They seem to have moved the Alvy Ray Smith interview into oblivion, because search doesn't seem to find it. It doesn't seem to be archived on the Wayback Machine or archive.is or replicated anywhere else on the internet. For all I know my HN comment is the last record of the quoted text anywhere. STANFORD ENGINEERING did this.
Vertical integration can be a massive mistake too. Usually manifesting itself as rewriting external dependencies to use in-house functionality before you have established happy customers, cash flow and/or business value propositions.
Levy was brought in, by Jobs, as CFO of Pixar prior to the IPO and the book is concerend with more of the business side of Pixar pivoting from hardware company to studio.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28114529-to-pixar-and-be...
what's touched on here seems to me as the best approach - showing up with a passion / vision with talented colleagues, then working towards that through any means possible.
I can't find the interview but maybe someone knows which one I'm talking about. It was around how the graphical designers put a lot of effort around designing the under side of a draw inside of a desk which no one will see. It was around the topic of going the extra mile for the things that don't matter to set the stage on how much they must care about the things that do matter.
Didn't they have that shop in Richmond in a bad part of town?