THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Seeing Special Effects and Not Even Knowing It : Hollywood Techie Ponders a Future of ‘Digital Studios’
Since Silicon Graphics Inc. decided a year ago to actively cultivate its growing entertainment industry business, Mike Ramsay has served as the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm’s emissary to Hollywood. On Thursday, he will preside over the opening of a new facility in Santa Monica designed to train the industry’s creative professionals in the finer techno-age arts of morphing and on-line editing. We caught up with him last week at the Artist Rights Digital Technology Symposium at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.
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Q: You make the machines that make digital dinosaurs and synthetic actors. And now you’re talking about virtual sets. Do you ever get hostility from people in the creative community who feel like you may be putting them out of a job?
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A: We get questions but we don’t get hostility. It’s more like “tell me more about what it is you’re going to be able to do so I can come to some judgment about whether I should be worried about that or not.” It’s that kind of thing. Not too much like we’re the atomic bomb manufacturer, you know, and, well, we don’t drop ‘em, we just make ‘em. I think the people appreciate that they need the technology.
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Q: What do you hope to do with Silicon Studio?
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A: The primary purpose is to educate the community into becoming proficient in using computers for creative work. We’re aiming at the people from the industry who either need to become more proficient or need to be completely trained on the use of computer equipment for content creation. So, we’re not talking about out-of-work aerospace people. For example, somebody who’s a video editor might come and get trained on the use of non-linear editing techniques, using computers. Somebody who’s been in compositing or animation would get the benefit of that training.
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Q: Is the logic that once people are trained to use your machines, they’ll buy more of them?
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A: Yes, one of the goals is to attract more and more people to our equipment and we’re learning in this industry that you don’t do that like you do it in other markets, you don’t do it like you’re selling to the engineering community. You do it by offering them a whole package, so it’s the computer, it’s the support, it’s potentially integration, it’s the training, and it’s the community stuff. It’s all of that.
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Q: So it really is a “relationship business?”
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A: Well, we’re learning that. After all, a large percentage of the people that we deal with are not technical people. You can’t go to them and say, “You have to buy our computer versus that computer because it’s got more mega-flops than theirs.” You have to say, “We would like to be your technology partner. We have the capability to help you make money and be successful. And we’ll take care of it when it doesn’t work for you, and if you don’t have people that are qualified to use it, we’ll help you get them qualified.” It’s a very different story.
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Q: Are you doing a lot of lunches?
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A: I have done a few of them. You know, this industry is actually more accessible than a lot of others. For us to get into with the chairman of GM is like really hard, right? But to get in with the head of a studio or a complete entertainment enterprise, we can do that.
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Q: Why do you think that is?
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A: Well, we’ve talked to a number of executives from big companies and we talked about our “digital studio” idea, and they go, “Yes. I want one of them.” You know, “When can I have one of them?” So they relate to that. And today I think it’s because the use of computers in entertainment is a hot topic. The people at the top of the companies don’t know what it’s all about and I think we can help educate them.
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Q: What are the three coolest applications of your technology in movies and TV?
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I think the idea of the virtual set stuff is very compelling today, it’s right on the edge of being feasible because it requires real-time capability, super-high quality. Techniques of embedding people inside the virtual set are only just developing right now. And we’re gonna see dramatic improvements in that over time to the extent that I think virtual set will become a vital part of broadcast and movies.
Second, you know, we’re going to move into being able to do complete feature-length movies, all computer-generated. And I think it’ll create a look and a fascination in the audience that will be quite compelling, and I’m looking forward seeing what the impact of that will be.
The other that I find personally interesting is the way computers are being used today to not create special effects--well, they’re special effects but you never see them, you know, because they recreate reality. There’s the digital rain, and the jet plumes out of the Harrier in “True Lies” were computer-generated, but it looked real. And there are growing numbers of examples of movie companies who are doing that kind of thing to save cost and to do something that it would be too dangerous to do otherwise. And I think we’ll see a lot more of that--but we may not even know it.
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Q & A
Michael Ramsay
Title: President, Silicon Studio Inc.
Age: 45
Education: Bachelor’s from University of Edinburgh
Family: Married, no children
Favorite effect generated with an SGI workstation: “You mean besides the dinosaurs?”
Favorite special-effects movie: “2001: A Space Odyssey”
