Eric Cantor, the One Ring of Power, and my Virginian High School

Part One

Once upon a time, I attended the The Collegiate Schools in Richmond, Virginia, a somewhat prestigious private high school in the region. We had a number of people from Virginia society in our school, or their children at least, as well as some well-established outsiders. I propose to describe something about this High School because it affects all of us as citizens of this country.

You may ask, why would Michael's High School be important to all of us as citizens?

Because Eric Cantor is now the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives in Congress and Eric went to Collegiate. 

And Collegiate is a somewhat amusing, somewhat peculiar place. It definitely has a culture all its own, and its place in Virginia society.

But first I want to review with you how our imperialist superpower works because you need to understand this to understand why Eric Cantor matters. Although the president gets the helicopters and the airplanes, and gets to say who gets a drone missile up his ass on a day-to-day basis, it is in fact Congress that allocates the money for those missiles and helicopters. And in general, the executive branch abides by the law, most of the time at least, we hope, and those laws must be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.

But to bring a bill up to a vote is not a trivial matter, and it requires the machinations and scheming of the two political parties to do so. Every time there is an election, the House and the Senate reorganizes itself into a majority and minority coalition, and each of those coalitions has representatives on the important committees that are preparing the legislation and the budgets. So if the Republicans have a majority of the House, as they do, their representative is the chair of, for example, the House Armed Services Committee. Seniority in the House and Senate also plays a role in determining who can get things done.  The standing committees take the lead in preparing legislation for their branch of Congress, House and Senate, and when passed by the committee it goes to the floor of the House or the Senate for a vote by all the members. (1)  (2) 

the smoke filled room

So the House and the Senate are each a complicated network of smoke-filled rooms, each filled with power, self-entitlement, influence, obligations, history, villianry, idealism, and hypocrisy and having been driven mad by power, push each other around with their large software packages, working with great vigor to get nothing done.

But one stands above these smoke-filled rooms whose job it is to coordinate their actions and bring it to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Eric Cantor is the Majority Leader for the House of Representatives, and Eric went to Collegiate.  The mind reels.

End of Part One

Eric Cantor on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Cantor

The smoke filled room on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke-filled_room

The One Ring on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring

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1. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences works in a similar way. The various subsections nominate films in their respective categories, e.g. acting, screenwriting, costume design, film editing, cinematography, etc, but then the entire Academy membership votes on who receives the award that year.

2. If you think about each of those representatives and senators having constituents, each with their own strongly held beliefs, and multiply out the different agendas, then it becomes clear that most bills in Congress must be wild compromises almost by definition to "get out of committee".   Thus, having a major party that does not compromise throws a wrench into the system like you would not believe.

Comments on the Daily Variety Article about Rhythm and Hues

There is an interesting article in the Daily Variety about the cash crisis and related issues at Rhythm & Hues. You can read it here:  VFX House Rhythm and Hues Endures Cash Crunch

There are a number of amusing things about this article that someone who has not had the pleasure of working in this business might not realize.  The situation probably sounds worse than it is, although companies do go out of business as a result of things like this, they probably won't.   Here is some background information: 

1. R&H has done this sort of thing before and always survived.

Running what is essentially an unfinanced, work-for-hire, production service facility is a juggling act that requires immense skill and stamina. Every two years or so, in the early days of R&H, I would be told something like "R&H is in trouble, they are on half salary, maybe they will go out of business".  

But the reality is that when the work is not there, a good production company will have to reduce payroll. They can either lay people off, or find a way to help people stay on but at a lower salary. And then eventually the work comes in and people go back on full salary. Don't worry, I would say, they will be fine.  

2. The visual effects facilities business is a very low margin business.

The visual effects facilities business is incredibly labor intensive, skill intensive, capital intensive, R&D intensive, risky and competitive.

In the days when commercial (e.g. advertising) production was the primary work, a facility like R&H would completely recreate itself every 12 weeks or so. Motion picture projects last longer than advertising projects and are often much bigger, but they are then by definition more risky. If a project is delayed, it has a much larger impact on the cash and work flow of the studio.

3. The Studios do not care about your cash flow.

Projects start when it is convenient for them to start, and end when it is convenient for them to end. The facility has no (or very little) say in the matter. But a company like R&H has an astounding payroll to make every two weeks. They either have to have the projects that make that payroll, or they have to lay people off. If they lay people off, they may or may not be able to hire them back if your project finally decides to start.   (1)

4. The Studios are adversarial.

The studios could not care less if a facility goes out of business. If anyone tells you differently, laugh at them and call them stupid. I can give you example after example where a vfx facility saved a screwed up production from itself and got slandered for doing the studios a favor. (See for example, ILM and Paramount on Hunt for Red October, which will be the subject of a later post). (2)

5. Any situation like this will be manipulated by the competition.

Your competition will do everything in their power to manipulate the situation to reduce confidence in the troubled facility, and thus cause all their clients to pull the work, forcing the company out of business.

6. Notice this happens as they await the word on their Academy Award.

R&H has been nominated for an academy award for Life of Pi.  Actually, a facility can not be nominated, but they did the work and people from R&H are listed.   Notice that doing good work, which everyone says about Life of Pi, doesn't seem to help that much in the short run.  (The proper way to say that is "... that and three dollars and fifty cents will get you a decaf espresso in this town").

I want to finish this incomplete analysis (there is much more that could be said) with the following thought: Although this is probably a very difficult situation for R&H, or we would not be reading about it in Daily Variety, this is the kind of weirdness that a production company like R&H is expected to be able to deal with.   And deal with it they probably will.    They may have to restructure and / or downsize, but that would be par for the course.   The only reason why R&H would not be fine is if the founders, John and Pauline, decided they wanted to do something else.

_________________________________

1. A production company will of course have a cash reserve that they have carefully built up to tide them over the unevenness of payments and down periods.  But that reserve will go very quickly indeed.  It is one of the reasons it was healthier when a studio could balance their production across several different industry areas (e.g. advertising vs motion picture vs special venue) to maintain some income when one area was depressed.

2. Boss Film Corporation (BFC) was doing the visual effects for Hunt for Red October and was being treated very harshly by the studio and the director of the film.   There are many potential reasons for this, but I doubt it was because Boss was completely screwing up.  There were (past tense, Boss Film Corporation is no longer in business) many excellent people at BFC and Dave Stewart certainly knew how to shoot "dry for wet", as it is called.   Mike Fink was called in to help supervise, and ultimately the production was pulled from BFC and given to ILM with a change in schedule (more time) and budget (much more money).  ILM did a very good job, of course and they charged Paramount a lot of money to come in at the end and do this production.  Paramount, being cowards, used ILM to manage their difficult director, e.g. they let ILM be the bad guy when Peter Hyams wanted changes.   Ok, fine. The movie comes out and it does well, even if it is a silly story, and for years and years and years I heard Paramount complaining about how ILM had "reamed them a new asshole" for doing the work under those circumstances.  I am sure ILM charged a premium, why not?

In other words, the studios are spoiled children who want it all for free, and don't want to invest their own money to have the capability in house.  They want to be able to buy the service cheaply when they want it and not pay for the R&D or maintaining the infrastructure.  And they are able to get away with this because they are, after all, the only game in town.

Simulation of Classic Solari / Split Flap Sign Technology

[Update: 2/4/2013 The Solari company is online, one just needed to know their correct name.  "Solari di Udine".]

As we slam headlong into the chaos of our future, and embrace whatever stupid idea someone has for new media or a smart phone, we also have the opportunity to recall some pretty wonderful "old media", or "receding media technology".

One of my favorites of old media, was something called a "Solari sign", or a (don't blame me) split-flap sign, so named because the letters were on metal plates that were split down the middle. The sign would use an actuator to pick which letter was visible, and as it moved through the different letters, it made a very distinctive "chattering" sound.

The sign at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, PA

You would see these signs in about 100 places in the world, mostly train stations in places like Paris, New York, Milan, London, Frankfurt and so forth. The signs were made by an Italian company called "Solari". Solari has no presence on the Internet.   Stop the presses, we have found them.  Ok, so this will be more interesting.

See http://www.solari.it/.

The Wikipedia page on "split flap" displays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

The Museum of Modern Art in NYC on "Hacking the Solari"
http://wp.moma.org/talk_to_me/2011/09/hacking-the-solari/

A Youtube video of a real Solari sign (for Amtrak) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1SAjGfYPI0

And finally, my simulation of the Solari sign, written without any documentation or operating guide of the sign itself.  Clearly my simulation has a ways to go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLjdEeGq8HA

I am trying to find someone to use this simulation (suitably art directed) for some public sign, maybe a render farm queue display or something.

Farsi.  

English.

The zither music is just for atmosphere and was ripped from the sountrack of The Third Man (1949).

The Esoteric Knowledge and the Hollow Earth

At Global Wahrman, we plan to reveal the hidden knowledge, sometimes known by the elect as the esoteric knowledge.

Of course, not everyone is ready to receive the wisdom and those of you who are not yet ready should go away until you are. Go beat on some drums and burn incense or read Blavatsky or something, and then, when you are ready, come back and the knowledge will be revealed.

Today's esoteric knowledge primer will be on the hollow earth, or as I like to say, the Hollow Earth.

Of course, we all know that the earth is hollow, and that vast subterranean caverns exist beneath the surface, filled with utopias, civilizations , and statuesque women in tight clothes that stagger the imagination. How could it be otherwise? How could it not be true with all the fiction that has been written about it? In fact, were it not true, that would cast doubt on all sorts of things that we know are true, like Nazi UFOs and Atlantean Crystal Wisdom, so I think we can be certain that it is true.

The apparent reason for this post is to record notes from a book about the Hollow Earth, by David Standish. You can find that book here.

The following may seem a little cryptic, but that is to be expected about esoteric knowledge, don't you think?

0. What is the relationship between the feminist utopian fantasies and the Hollow Earth?  Why are women authors compelled to use the Hollow Earth as a setting for their anti-male diatribes?  Is there, dare we say it, some subtle phallic or vaginal symbolism associated with the Symmes' holes?  (See illustration below)

1.Clearly, the relationship between Baudelaire and Poe needs to be further investigated.  For those of you who may not know this (and I did not), Baudelaire single handedly rehabilitated Edgar Allen Poe in the eyes of literary criticism with his translations of Poe into French.  Here is the first paragraph of a scholarly paper on the topic: 

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40617398?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101734791137

2. Poe's novel about the hollow earth, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" is available online here.

3. Poe's "Ms. found in a Bottle" is a great title and could be repurposed into a film or story about a young woman who drinks, for example. The title has been unintentionally updated, of course, "Ms." used to mean "manuscript".

4. Some documents by David Symmes here.

Subliminal Anti-Phallic Symbolism, Perhaps?

5. Alexander Dumas wrote a novel about a "wandering jew" who goes to the hollow earth. This novel has never been translated into English. It is called Isaac Laquedem: The Wandering Jew. This sounds pretty damn weird, there must be a reason it has not been translated.  Weird.

6. Standish rattles off a whole litany of Hollow Earth titles that I had never heard of before.  A later post will list some of them.   They will be assigned reading.

Ancient Computer Animation Artifacts and Homer Simpson

In this post we discuss a very early use of computer animation in the mainstream, before the tsunami of computer animation we are all suffering from today, back when it was a novel and expensive choice. And we discuss how to appreciate the ancient motifs of those early days of animation.  In other words, the particular piece we describe is filled with computer animation in jokes, as you will see.

It is part of the ancient history of computer animation, back when it was an experimental and impractical medium for entertainment and art, that the best way to see computer animation was to attend the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference and see the Electronic Theatre, which was originally shown on a few nights of the conference only. Not only was this the best way, it was usually the only way, as this is in the days before Youtube when computer animation was an acquired taste of eclectic researchers and artists only.

Since the audience on those two or three nights of SIGGRAPH was essentially the entire audience for computer animation in the world and everyone who attended, or almost everyone, was very knowledgeable about computer animation, there had developed a series of motifs that were either funny, or silly, or just mistakes, that we all knew. For example, an early computer animation model was a teapot that someone at the Univ of Utah cobbled together out of patches to make a surface with a certain complexity. He modelled the teapot by hand by typing in numbers into a text file, and that teapot, that very same teapot, was used in a lot of papers and films.

So then, when some outsider from the motion picture industry would slum with us and attend the Electronic Theatre, to find a way to exploit the medium for their corrupt ends, they would walk away puzzled. Why, they would ask, would a glass teapot dropping on a table and shattering in slow motion be the cause of a standing ovation?   "Why can't they do more films like the one with the lamp, you know, a funny film that doesn't have any ideas?"

But we were living in a fool's paradise. Computer animation became more practical and more accepted, and that led inevitably to the corruption and decay that you see today.

The transition period between R&D and mainstream production when 3D became both more practical and controllable, as well as accepted by the motion picture and television industries, and by the audience, was, arguably between 1991 and 1995. Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993) established computer animation's respectability in visual effects and Toy Story (1995) in animated features.

The piece we are going to discuss premiered roughly three weeks before Toy Story, and thus was produced before computer animation was considered to be real and respectable in animation.

It was called "Homer 3", where 3 is a superscript, which means Homer to the 3rd power. It was for the seventh season of The Simpsons and their sixth episode of the "Treehouse of Horror" Halloween special. In this episode, Homer tries to escape from being subjected to his wife's relatives and escapes behind a bookcase into a mysterious dimension, the 3rd dimension. After being lost, and causing the destruction of that universe, he is saved by Bart at the last minute and returned safely to the 2nd dimension.

Homer notices his new 3D physique

Boy, this place looks expensive.

The computer animation was done at Pacific Data Images (PDI) before they were acquired by Dreamworks Feature Animation.

You can see a very bad dub of this piece here:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2enyl_homer-3d_shortfilms#.UQjG2h2w-Gk

Of the many homages to the SIGGRAPH Electronics Theatre in this piece, here are the ones that stand out to me:

1. The crazy, artificial, and unrealistic camera move that goes nowhere.

2. The signpost that has an X, Y and Z direction.

3. The use of the cone (and other primitive objects, e.g. sphere and cube), a simple geometric object used a lot in the early days of computer animation for all sorts of things. The III logo (1) was a sphere, a cone, and a cube.

4. The emphasis on simple water and fluid, fluid being a hard problem in computer animation and a lot of various tests made it into the film show.

5. The implausible architecture and Tron-like environment.

Professor Frink explains "The Third Dimension" and also demonstrates why translating 2D characters to 3D is a very tough problem.  Imagine translating the Professor to 3D naively from this image, it would be grotesque.

6. Homer Simpson says "Boy, this place looks expensive. I feel like I am spending a lot of money just standing here". Which he was, computer animation used to charge by the second (sometimes it still does), and it was both difficult and expensive to just have a character on screen scratching his butt.

7. There are also some shading artifacts on Homer's face that probably came from the simple shading model. This may or may not have been intentional, and the artifacts may or may not have been because Homer was modelled from polygons (I am pretty sure he wasn't, but I am not positive). But it looked like the artifacts we used to see all the time in the early days. If it was intentional, it was a homage. But it was probably just happenstance.

8. Homer asks if anyone back in the 2nd dimension saw the movie Tron.  All but one say no, and he changes his story so as not to admit of seeing Tron.

I think PDI did an excellent job on something that was at the time a very prestigious piece indeed.

But the best thing that this piece has going for it was not standard at the Electronic Theatre but is very common for the The Simpsons: it is very well written.

Treehouse of Horror VI on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_VI

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1. III is Information International, Inc.   This large company which is still in business and thriving, had an early computer animation group that used their film recorder technology, and worked on Tron.  Many famous and important people either founded or worked at III.  We will discuss III's adventure in "digital scene simulation" in another post.

Early 18th Century British Underworld Slang

The Thieves Cant (or language) is a work written sometime between 1690 and 1720 by one B.E. Gent in London. It purports to be a dictionary of terms of art of the various "underworld" groups of the time: thieves, gypsies, beggars and so forth.

Its full title is:

A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient & Modern of the Canting Crew, in its several tribes, gypsies, beggars, thieves, cheats, &c.

In other words, this is underworld slang from what historians call the Early Modern Period in England..

The term "canting crew" is itself completely obscure to me, but it may refer to beggars, and their "cant", or speech, or possibly their begging rap.

When looking up the meaning of "canting crew", I came across the following review in The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/article/161410/canting-crew#

It is the case that subgroups of this type, e.g. outsiders, have always had their own "language", usually a vocabulary used by members of this group and the people they interact with. We have them all the time to this day, particularly with various groups of outcasts from polite society such as economists, philosophers, astrophysicists and so-called visual effects practitioners, who must disguise their anti-social and disagreeable beliefs behind a cloud of mysterious jargon known only to the elect.

Exactly how correctly this work describes the actual language used by these groups is not clear to me. But it is amusing in its own right whatever its historical accuracy.

Entry in online library:

http://archive.org/details/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft

Scan of The Thieves Cant in PDF form:

http://ia600504.us.archive.org/7/items/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft.pdf

Text of The Thieves Cant

http://archive.org/stream/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft_djvu.txt

Photograph Demonstrating the Permanence of High School

New York Magazine has an excellent essay on the subject of whether or not we ever really leave High School.   Its a topic of great interest to most of us, but may be slightly misdirected, as it seems that so many of our peers have the emotional maturity of someone stuck in Jr. High School, not High School.

But nevertheless, its an interesting article and it can be found here.

But the real reason I am mentioning it is because I thought that they introduced their article with a truly great picture.

Does the "Happy Face" button and haircuts identify the year of the original photograph?

Notice the attention to detail.   They are wearing very similar clothes, if not identical ones, and are trying to duplicate their facial expressions, slumping body positions, the sense of a group of friends on the loose in New York City (presumably), etc.   Its the same t-shirt that the guy 2nd from the left is wearing, or an amazing replica.   Notice the vacant grin on the guy sitting down.   Its beautiful.

What makes it great is not the technique: the goal of the technique was to duplicate the cheesy feel of the original.   Technique is important in anything, but it is not the only thing.  These pictures could be out of focus and they would still be great.

The Explanation in Cinema: A New Synthesis

[1/27/2013  It turns out that The Departed has a fabulous, nearly canonical example of an Explanation, in a different scene.   That scene can be seen, so to speak, here.]

We contend that the highest form of the filmmaking art, the very pinnacle, is the art of the explanation. In this cinematic form, a character explains "what is really going on" to another character or characters in our drama. It may or may not be in the form of a confrontation, or it may be a pleasant chat over dinner, or in a hallway.

The exciting new structural form is superior to the old method of filmmaking which might show the character doing something.   How dreary it is to see in film after film, characters demonstrating who they are through their actions.   Another giant robot fight, another planet exploding, another superhero revealing him or herself as a super villain and so on and so forth.   What a relief it would be to have one of these superheroes make a conference call and just explain to all the super villains why what they are doing is a bad thing to do and that they really ought to stop doing it.    This new approach, the explanation,  is much less expensive, avoids unnecessary action, reduces noise, and can be very dramatic and memorable for those few films which indulge in that optional element of filmmaking, the story. We will review these advantages in this essay.

The first benefit of the explanation is that it is always much more efficient and cost-effective to shoot then actually showing what happened. Why bother to show it if you can just talk about it? For example, instead of spending millions of dollars showing giant robots beating the shit out of each other, you might have one character say to another "Wow, did you see those giant robots beating the shit out of each other?" Then the other character might say "I sure did, we were lucky to get out of there! Whew". The plot point having been established, giant robots beating the shit out of each other, the film can move on and has saved millions in production costs.

Jack Nicholson and Leonardo di Caprio preparing to have a little chat.

The second advantage of the explanation is that it avoids the drag of too much action. Many movies have too much stuff going on, it would be much better if they just had a few characters talk about what was going on. I suppose that is an aesthetic choice, but I think having too many giant robots or exploding planets in a film is an impediment, not an asset. Maybe that is just me.

And that leads to our third advantage of the explanation: less extremely loud noise. Although the film industry today creates product in many very different but important topics, from giant robots fighting, to mutant superheroes saving the world, to hordes of zombies eating every brain in sight, these very different themes do seem to involve very long sequences of things exploding and hitting each other, loudly.   How much more civilized to have several members of the cast narrating the action instead of showing the action:  "Look!  The horde of zombies!  Oh my!  A planet exploding!"   Then one would not have to bring earplugs to the theatre as one has to do so often today.

But nothing in life is free, and the explanation does have its downsides in that it makes certain requirements and demands on the script.  The biggest demand, and the most problematic, is that, generally speaking, the script needs to have a story.   This by implication may mean that the production may have to have a writer who, naturally enough, writes the story.   Many modern films have neither writer nor story, and without one our new technique here does not work well.  

But when it is done well, the explanation can be some of the most memorable in film. We have previously presented several such explanations, see here, here, and here.

Here we present another one, from the movie The Departed (2006).

Why Are So Many Pioneers of Computer Animation Chronically Unemployed?

Needs to be revised.

The people that I know in computer animation, who can be said to pioneer the field, fall into a number of categories.   Some are well entrenched in academia, some seem to have jobs for life at the one or two stable companies in this field, some go from job to job every 5 or 10 years, and some, quite a few, are chronically unemployed and financially ruined, or nearly so.

I think it is sensible to discuss why this might be so.  It will have implications later on when we discuss recommendations for SIGGRAPH and other topics.

Of course this is my own opinion.  So far as I know no one else discusses or is interested in the phenomenon.

My intuitive take on this matter is that it involves a lack of respect for one's elders, goddamnit.   We had to walk through the snow every day to do computer animation.  When we needed a computer we had to build our own.  We thought 250 MBs was a lot of disk.   We were excited by getting 800 vectors on the screen 15 times a second.  You kids are just spoiled, cough, cough.

Unfortunately, the rest of the essay is serious.

My first general observation is that the reasons for this chronic unemployment is that it is not just one thing, or one mistake, unless that mistake was to go into computer animation at all.  The reasons for the problem are many, with some applying to one person, but others to a different one.   The list below is an attempt to mention the major topics but not all of these topics apply to every person.

The second observation is that many of the issues below are not really mistakes at all, they are in many cases a natural result of being in this field when it was early, or other circumstantial things such as being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Also, whatever the issues are here, I do not think it is about the current economic depression we are in that the government denies exists.  Perhaps that depression and the dot com bust has made things worse, but its not the primary cause.

1. Most of the pioneers are colorful individuals who took chances, in a world which expects everyone to be like everyone else and not take risks.  So when they are considered later for employment, people who are not their peers judge them by saying they are too colorful, or controversial, or take too many risks, and they are not hired.

2. In inventing the field they made unconventional career choices or worked for companies with very short lives, and thus have a non-traditional employment history.  Again they are judged negatively and not employed.

3. Computer animation/graphics/3D turns out to be a niche field.   The few companies that advertise for 3D people are generally looking for production people to use tools, not to do new kinds of work.

4. The relationship between computer graphics technical knowledge and other related fields, such as user interface design, is not recognized.  Furthermore, even areas which use specific computer animation/3D technology have split off to form their own fields with their own credentials, such as medical imaging, or scientific visualization.

5. All of the early computer animation companies made mistakes.   Those who stayed in business were able to show that they had learned from their mistakes, those which did not were tarred with the brush of those mistakes.   

6. Many if not most of the pioneers of this field were/are multidisciplinary, and by definition multidisciplinary people are a hard sell, because they have a confused marketing image. There is lip service to something called the Renaissance Man (or Woman), but it is just that, lip service. It has no niche in the employment market.

7. Many of the pioneers ignored formal credentials because they were not relevant to inventing the field. But when the field became mature, those credentials became required for employment, so the pioneers were out.

8. Many of the companies that the pioneers worked at are no longer in business, which means that one can not return there, nor are the people to see that you get the appropriate awards, credit, etc. 

9. The field is very competitive.  People from the early days are generally slandered, unless they are in a position of power which does not describe the people who are unemployed.

10. People and companies in this field are not the least bit interested in where ideas came from, nor do they care to invent new ideas or techniques. Even if they were there is no belief that those who did the original work will do new work that matters.   Doing good work buys you nothing for the future is the lesson I have learned.

11. By definition, the people who invented the field are autodidacts and learned what they needed to learn in the process of doing. Today, people are only hired if their resume and work experience show exactly what is required and nothing else.   That does not describe the pioneers.

12. As the field matured, it became wildly oversubscribed. The tsunami of new people have no idea who or how the field was invented and could not care less.  The companies who hire have lots of choices and also could not care less.   

13. The companies that survived are generally run by people who are very competitive with the people who are out of work.

14.  Pioneers often have the problem of not being able to show new work, since their skills were often tied to proprietary software which is no longer available to them.

15. It is easier to hire someone new, recently from school, then to hire someone with experience.

16.  Jobs are limited because so many have been off-shored.

17. Ageism.   Computer animation is one of the few industries I know (along with the music industry and the game industry) that proudly admits it is ageist.

18. There is no noblesse oblige in the computer animation industry.

Are there lessons to draw from this?  Yes.  In America, to be early in a field such that you are not able to profit from it is to be wrong.    Second, it is true what they say, there are no prizes for second place.

____________________________________

1. There is a longer topic lurking in here, that I am skimming over in the interest of not making an already over long post even longer.   And that topic is why not do something entrepreneurial?   That is a very good question and deserves a very serious answer.  For the sake of this discussion, we are leaving the entrepreneurial issues until later.   A brief version of my take on it is that in fact there are some entrepreneurial opportunities, but that they are dicey.

[revised 6/9/2014]

The Amazing Planetarium Museum

In our post-sputnik world, the 1950s and the early 1960s, the US Government funded the creation of planetariums throughout the country to inspire our youth to dedicate their lives to science and so overthrow and defeat Godless communism.

I loved Planetariums, I love them still, but most of all I love the fabulous contraptions built to simulate the Universe on a dome above our heads.

One day, at the old Griffith Park Observatory, I hung out after a show and checked out the Planetarium control panel. It had big knobs like you found in 50s science fiction movies: and they had labels like "Comets", and "Beginning of Time", "The Planets", "Meteors. I realized suddenly that the true Planetarium was an interactive display, under the guidance and control of the master of ceremonies. There was probably a way to automate the shows, I am sure, but fundamentally, at heart, it was designed to be live and interactive.

There were only a few manufacturers of Planetariums, in fact, I was only aware of the big three: Zeiss, Minolta and Spitz until I came across this dedicated and comprehensive Planetarium museum. Now I know of a whole swarm of planetarium devices I had never heard of before.

Please review this site if you care about Planetarium history. I think he is trying to sell his collection, I wish I had not gone into Computer Animation so that I could afford to buy it.

See the museum here:

http://planetariummuseum.org/

Video clip of various planetariums spinning around

http://planetariummuseum.org/gonewld.wmv