The commencement advice you won’t hear — Be a Glue Person
Book quote of the day;
I got the most compelling answers from a thin, wiry Italian named Marco Revelant. You may know him as the man who groomed King Kong.
On the Wednesday morning I met him, Revelant was wearing rimless glasses, a gray hoodie, and stubble that suggested he had gone two or three days without shaving. We met in a conference room in a low-slung building around the corner from a spot where tourists unloaded from buses to gawk at props from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A native of Padua, in northeast Italy, Revelant studied law in the 1990s, but he loved video games and, as a hobby, dabbled in using computers to create three-dimensional images. He got a job with an architecture firm, helping the architects move from traditional blueprints to computer-assisted design software, while in his spare time teaching himself to create digital images for video with computers, using software he had bought with his own savings. He soon found a way to make his hobby his profession, taking a job with a company in Milan that made graphics for TV commercials. It wasn’t particularly glamorous, but working in a small company doing small-budget projects, he got a taste for how all the different pieces of making a commercial that involved 3D effects came together — not only the digital images but also the script, the actors, the live-action shots, the audio. He was, by necessity, focused not just on generating images using his artistic touch and the power of computers but on understanding how those different moving pieces fit together. “It was a small firm,” he told me, “so you were doing a little bit of everything, a generalist.”
When he received an offer to apply these skills to a big-budget movie, he was thrilled, even if it meant moving to the other end of the planet. He signed a nine-month contract with a firm called Weta Digital to work on the third Lord of the Rings movie; he was still there fifteen years later, which is how I ended up sitting across from him that morning as various assistants buzzed around offering anyone in sight a bottled water or espresso. What enabled him to have staying power in an industry in which the technology and economics were shifting beneath his feet?
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One thing that made Revelant good at his job — the reason he was entrusted with King Kong’s fur — is that he understood both the artistic vision and the technical needs, and he also understood how to integrate them, better than most. Making Kong’s fur — 10 million individual hairs, modeled on yak fur — look right was both an artistic challenge and a programming challenge, and Revelant was in the rare position of being able to guide people with different types of talent toward that goal. He had very little software coding experience himself, but he was able to recognize problems in the way many of the other modelers interacted with the programmers who created their software. They were too focused on asking for changes that seemed like things that would make the job easier but in practice would require either too much processing power or too much time and too many programming resources.
“It was interesting trying to understand the coders’ perspective, because you start thinking differently about the problem you want to solve,” Revelant said. “What I found is a lot of users will be able to tell the coder, ‘I want to be able to move this slide and do this.’ But that’s not actually what they want. They try to give the solution but don’t abstract the problem to understand the bigger picture.”
He worked with software developers to create a program — which they called, naturally, Fur — that let the modeler manipulate the direction of one “guide hair” that would control the behavior of thousands of hairs around it. That allowed them to apply directions to each patch of fur: make a clump of mud here, make this patch more scraggly, that type of thing. It was labor-intensive work that lasted about a year; each patch of fur had to be manually adjusted in each of the hundreds of shots that included Kong. Revelant’s daughter was born during production, and he took only a single day off. When it was done, Weta’s people were proud of their work but saw they had a problem. There would surely be more movies in the future that involved furry creatures. Their software was simply too clunky and labor-intensive to use if, for example, they were to make a movie that had many digitally rendered characters instead of just one.
“I was talking to one of the coders and said, ‘Do you think it’s possible to touch the hair? To manipulate the curve of each hair? Could you manipulate millions of hairs directly?’” That is, instead of having to manipulate a smaller number of guide hairs, could a program be written that would allow artists, using tools on a computer screen, to comb, tease, trim, muss, or otherwise manipulate a virtual character’s fur just the way a real hairstylist can go to work on an actor’s hair? Part of the challenge was thinking beyond making the old software a little better and imagining how, starting fresh, the process of creating realistic, digitally rendered fur could become more efficient. The Weta team set to work creating a better system for making digital fur, which they called, appropriately, Barbershop. Revelant was the go-between for two different types of highly skilled professionals who frequently didn’t know how to communicate with each other — at a moment when successful collaboration was the only way to get an important task done. “The thing is a lot of the coders don’t know how to groom. They rely on someone to tell them what the software needs to do. But sometimes it’s difficult for the person who is skilled at grooming to tell them in a language they understand,” Revelant said. When groomers and others with a modeling background try to talk to the coders, they tend to focus on narrow features rather than really engage on how to solve the underlying problem. “People tend to think, ‘I want to do this, ergo I will tell the coder what to build.’ They don’t tell the coder, ‘I want to achieve this,’ and work together to figure out the best way to achieve it.”
Revelant can speak the language of moviemakers and artists but can also read technical papers on new modeling techniques. “He doesn’t actually look at the code,” explained Paolo Selva, the head of software engineering at Weta Digital. “But he understands how something like the elastic rod dynamics on hair work. He’ll understand the logic behind it even if he may not know how to implement it himself. It’s not a skill many artists have. If all of the artists were able to do that, it would be much easier to talk to them.”
When they started, they were hoping to use Barbershop to handle the fur on Snowy, the dog in The Adventures of Tintin. They had no idea how urgent, and important, the software would become. As work was under way, Weta Digital landed the visual effects work for Rise of the Planet of the Apes….
— Irwin, Neil. How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World
For Discussion: What book recommendations would you suggest to those finishing school in 2020? We would recommend, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World by Neil Irwin, Range by David Epstein and Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers by John Kay and Mervyn King.
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