I worked for two separate studios, one at DreamWorks and one at Disney, that were both involved in this saga, and both have since been shuttered. (Edit: to clarify they were involved as part of the class, not to my knowledge involved in collusion.)
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.
Of course, another way to read this is that these studios weren't viable if they had to play by the rules. So they broke the rules and violated the rights of their staff.
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.
> Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed.
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.
I don’t feel like the lawsuit really changed salaries either
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.
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.
Where on earth did you get that idea? Corps aren’t always (or even usually) liable for subcorps, and subcorps are never liable for the actions of parent corps. The whole reason there are two separate legal entities is to establish separate liabilities & finances.
Yes, using the term liable was a mistake. I meant "responsible".
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.
What value are you hoping to contribute to this discussion? You are speaking in generalities and platitudes and making so many assumptions it’s hard to respond. Your description of the corporate subsidiary relationship is still incorrect.
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).
You are trying to assert the studios were good studios. Yet, you provide no proof that the board, and CxO ezecs were completely unaware of (as you claim) parent corps making back room deals.
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.
Hahaha this is cracking me up. Seriously. Wow. You are missing literally everything. The reason there’s no value in discussing this is that you have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, but you think you do and are now attacking me. You made it crystal clear you don’t understand corporate subsidiaries. You have no idea what studio I’m referring to or what it’s relationship to the parent corp was, or more importantly what it’s relationship to the named defendants in the suit was, and you don’t seem to care about these details or any actual facts at all. You could have asked nicely, but instead you’re doubling down on incorrect assumptions and trying to insult me. Why should I provide more facts to you when you’re willfully ignoring all the facts I’ve given so far? What is really bothering you? I get the feeling it has nothing to do with boards or execs or subsidiaries.
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.
The bad studios comment wasn't meant to be a judgement of the product or your work. I had meant bad businesses (costs exceed revenues). Take even that with a grain of salt - I was taking all my facts from the comment I responded to and the link. I'm not familiar with this particular saga.
I realize the way I wrote my first comment led you to believe the studios were knowingly involved in the collusion, but that’s not what I intended to say, which is why I clarified. It’s just best not to make assumptions or try to make strong statements about something you’re not familiar with. The narrative summary you left is entirely backwards, because good studios closed while the suits’ defendants are still here and still operating. The studios I was in weren’t bad business either. Revenues exceeded costs. These closures happened for other reasons, despite the fact that CG as a whole isn’t very profitable for most players.
Ultimately, this is why we have regulation: because if behavior is allowed that lowers the cost to do business, businesses in a highly competitive space will eventually do it.
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).
I fully agree about the need for regulation, especially because it matters more in other commodity industries (farming, food, construction, etc.) much more than it does in computer graphics.
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.”
I'm glad someone stood up to Jobs, what a complete and utter asshole. Nothing says job security like telling your boss that their demands are "bullshit"
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.
> 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.
So he was a bully who only targeted those people who wouldn't fight back?
He was a bully who expected you to fight back, because if you didn't, it meant that you either didn't know what you were talking about, didn't have the courage of your convictions, or both.
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.
How on earth is "fighting back" supposed to be correlated with "know what you were talking about"? All experience shows these are not correlated whatsoever. I have certainly met many people who didn't know what they were talking about but nevertheless was very combative about it. And conversely people who was very smart but (perhaps naively) thought ideas would win on merit, not on who shout the loudest, and therefore didn't "fight".
No, I was responding to the parent comment which implied that "standing up to Jobs" was something few people did. Having 2nd-hand knowledge of several incidents, my impression is that it was not uncommon and sometimes necessary.
While the Pixar people are probably not aware, they were actually in a race. There was a small group in Brazil using computer graphics for TV commercials that decided to do a full length movie:
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.
This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really amazing company is that they also have great graphical designers and story writers. It is the integration that makes Pixar movies so great.
There's a story told by (if memory serves) Lasseter that when they showed Luxo Jr. in 1986 at SIGGRAPH, someone came up to him afterwards with a question. He was dreading the conversation, because he thought they were going to ask some terribly technical question and he'd have to flag down one of the studio members for help, but the questioner just asked "So is the big lamp the mom or the dad?"
When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I would love to walk through one of their internal scene files and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate to.
Unfortunately I couldn't find the video either but it was fairly similar to the TED talk you linked (just longer and had slightly more "internal" details).
They tried to sell my dad some machines. He was in the oil industry. The sale didn't work out. My dad later had a job interview with them. That didn't work out either. Both were probably for the best, but what a different life I would have had if either had gone the other way.
> What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview?
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.
Oil and gas industries are data crunching monsters. While I thought it was impressive I got to work with < terabyte datasets I’ve met so many data scientists crunching petabyte seismic datasets that could give backblaze a run for their money.
I’m convinced if SV hadn’t happened in SV it would have happened in Dallas or Houston.
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
When I was a kid in the early 90s, a nearby university had a Cray 1. We went on field trip to see it. IIRC, they got it because some oil company had gotten a better supercomputer and didn't need it anymore, so it was probably originally purchased sometime in the 80s or earlier.
> 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.
Funny, I just found that link myself. I guess it makes sense, there was data and there was a need to comb through it. Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data.
"Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of 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.
When Fairchild got out of the computing business (84/85 ish) it was the huge oilfield services company Schlumberger that bought the AI lab run by Marty Tenenbaum. IIRC S had some Crays and a Connection Machine. Schlumberger Palo Alto was across the street (other side of Foothill Expwy) from PARC. IIRC they had a lot of interesting visualization work; I turned them down (despite their excellent research staff) for PARC because I wanted to work on theory of computation.
> This wouldn't be the first time we'd talked to Jobs. Three months earlier, on August 4, Steve had invited Ed, me, and Ajit Gill, our financial manager, to his mansion in Woodside, Calif. Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no, that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept his money in the form of a venture investment. And he agreed.
That wasn't the first time they'd talked to Jobs either:
>> 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.
This is why I hate the "sell shovels to miners" advice. No, the biggest winners are the ones who vertically integrate and capture the full value stack, not the tools vendors.
Vertical integration is so clearly the best path when you are operating in technology, and especially when dealing with pure software plays. If you control everything down to the bare metal, no one can ever fuck with you. Your common denominator is your adversaries common denominator too. Only super exotics like Apple have actually captured a true 100% vertical down through the hardware, and the impact of this shows in the market.
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.
Back in 2017 a "Humble Bundle" package included the Lawrence Levy book "To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History"[0]. I got the book there and really enjoyed it.
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.
Dealers of Lightning has an interesting chapter about Pixar's PARC roots in the SuperPaint group. There's also a very good article somewhere on the web (I can't find it now) about the NYIT years; the NYIT lab was a very strange arrangement. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnpqnm/the-1970s-graphics-pr... is short and OK.
its so interesting to me how so much of entrepreneurship today is showing up with a narrowly defined problem, and building a solution around it. then there is the huge trap of building a solution without a problem.
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.
For anyone interested in the history of Pixar (and lucas films sprockets) I would recommend the books "Droid maker" and "Creativity inc". Droid maker is more historical about the early years, and creativity inc is more about how Pixar works.
I vaguely remember a paragraph from a Pixar interview around the topic of attention to detail.
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.
It was in an industrial park. I didn't think it was a bad part of town when I visited but the Pixar folks considered all of Richmond to be the bad part of town.
