Moving Pictures – An Interview With Animator Michael Zachary Huber

A few of the Ocarina crew recently returned from Siggraph2009, the 36th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Held in New Orleans the week of August 3-7, the event drew participants from around the world. We were newbies to the event, and so decided get some perspective from an industry veteran, who has been attending Siggraph every year for the past decade and a half.

Michael Zachary Huber is an animator and educator who has worked with the top studios, including director James Cameron, Digital Domain, and Electronic Arts (EA). He’s an assistant professor at Cogswell Polytechnical College an animation and engineering school in Sunnyvale. Over the years he’s witnessed peaks and valleys when it comes to Hollywood’s love affair with visual effects.

“In the 1990s they were a novelty,” he said. “It was similar to the Internet, which came into its own later in that same decade. People were just on fire!”

The early 1990s were truly the heyday of Siggraph, he recalled.  It wasn’t unusual to see stars like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in attendance, and there was tremendous “buzz” in Hollywood. Yet some studios were burned by spending millions of dollars for lavish effects for movies that flopped.

He compares the new animation-driven effects such as CGI to the craze around 3-D movies in the 1950s. That type of special effect didn’t make movies better, just more novel.

“In some ways visual effects are the same thing. They are a tool, not an end unto themselves. The movie still has to be good for audiences to respond,” said Huber.

Nowadays directors and studios are getting smarter about where visual effects need to be used and where they don’t, he said.

Siggraph itself has been something of a barometer as to how the animation and effects side of the industry is faring. And this year, the attendance was far lower than in recent years, perhaps by as much as 25-50% in his estimation.

Huber’s interpretation–it’s not that the recession has meant that the industry is in real trouble, simply that this is a year in which studios are more cautious, but are still very much investing in the coming year. Said Huber, “I firmly believe there’s going to be a nice rebound.”

An exciting and fun part of the conference he said, is the Computer Animation Festival, where participants from around the world screen their latest work. Check out this extremely cool vid showing some of the work:

Huber himself has a short animation film, a co-production with Cogswell that he plans to show at next year’s event. Called “The Offering,” it’s a story that draws from Hindu legend yet includes elements from everything from Marvel Comics to Bollywood. It was made at the school, with students playing a large role in its creation. (The poster for the movie is shown at the top of this page.)

So, what about the geeky side of Siggraph?

“The conference definitely gets a steady stream of techno fans–people who are interested in the technology and want to come for the white papers,” he reported, adding that the need for efficient storage is something that many animation houses are recognizing.

“Looking at the first Transformers movie, which was made four or five years ago, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which did most of the effects, used about 30 TB of space for all of the files they needed during the production process. Compare that with the latest Transformers movie, which took up closer to 150-250 TB of space,” said Huber.

Even his own short film took up three terabytes of space to make, he said. So even small institutions that have limited budgets could benefit from some kind of compression or optimization technology.

Indeed, he said, the computer animation industry is perhaps the art form most closely tied to technology. This, he said, is another reason that this year’s Siggraph conference was less well attended–the tech industry is smarting from the effects of the recession.

Yet it’s also the pace of technological innovation that drives visual effects/animation studios to continually improve what they’re able to achieve. Effects such as 3-D animation are getting more complex, he said, especially now that studios have moved from 8-bit to 16- or 32-bit technology. One exciting new innovation is OpenEXR, a high dynamic-range (HDR) image file format developed by ILM. This allows studios to ingrain details in visual effects like never before, according to Huber.

“You’re not going to get the true richness unless you get the file formats like that,” he said.

However, he added that such new file formats are demanding and require a lot of space. This is no doubt why so many post-production and animation studios are looking for ways to optimize files in order to save disk space. As it happens, Ocarina stands alone in that it has algorithms that are designed specifically for over 100 file types–OpenEXR included. As many studios are already discovering, Ocarina is their ticket to space savings of as much as 80%.

Overall, Huber sees a bright future for his industry.

“We see films today that seem amazingly more complex and rich.  In ten years, all of that will be topped by what is coming.”

Well, I for one can’t wait for those coming attractions.