Soul Food for Business

I am hardly surprised at the findings of an MIT study that found that IBM employees that maintained online social relationships brought additional revenue to the company's bottom line. Any business involved in building relationships between the company and 3rd parties stands to gain from employees that regularly exercise their social circles. Malcolm Gladwell drives this point home in his book "The Tipping Point", in which he treats social and business circles as environments in which information is compared to a spreading virus and people are categorized into three distinct roles in spreading that virus. The thing that impressed me most about IBM's decision was their underlying philosophy of how to deal with the phenomena of Social Networking. Rather than to assume that it was a nuisance that interfered with the mechanisms of productivity, they decided that since Social Networking was not going to vanish, they might as well try to understand it. In the end, through regulation and guidelines to set expectations, IBM turned a "problem" into a competitive edge. Bravo.

The Tech Wave

Yesterday, one of my students asked if consoles would continue to be defined as ancillary devices hooked up to a TV, or if the word would evolve to refer to a new generation of devices that serve as portable multimedia players.

Historically, the record is mixed. In some regards, everybody still casually refers to broadcast monitors as TeleVisions, (TVs) regardless whether the technology is using a cathode ray tube (CRT), a plasma screen or an liquid crystal display (LCD). The same is not true of audio devices. You can identify the geriatric technophiles in the room by whether they listen to LPs, cassettes, CDs or their iPod. I'm pretty sure nobody says, " Check out the new tune on my MP3 player". And even if some folks did, it would fall out of fashion soon enough. After all, MP3 as a format will one day be supplanted by something either superior or with better compression.

By it's very technological nature, the video games industry must undergo change. Technology never remains static, but rather flows, like a wave, barreling in an unstoppable fashion toward new shores. Companies like Nintendo have always been able to adapt. Indeed, the ability to adapt to changes in technological waves has less to do with expertise, and more with innovation and core philosophies.

Can anything Virtual be Monumental?

Today I read that video games are now legally eligible for National Endowment ofr the Arts funding effectively granting them legal recognition as a work of art. Blogger John funk said it best: 

The "games as art" debate will likely continue raging for years before videogames reach complete cultural acceptance, but at least one important organization now officially considers games art: The US Federal Government. Or, rather, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) considers games art - which technically amounts to the exact same thing.

The whole purpose of NEA funding is to create a means by which an artist can create a work of art that would enhance the public good. The logic is fairly sound - beautification fosters civic pride and paves the way for economic prosperity.

This made me wonder:  It's easy to see how a physical work would add value to civilization and serve as a lightning rod for business and creativity. But what if the work you are creating is virtual? How do you associate the creators and the location in which the works were made with the works themselves? I think that film serves as the best model of what we can expect. As a resident of LA, it is easy to see the utter lack of monuments that actually represent the film industry. The real places of inspiration should be the massive sound stages at Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Sony, etc., but for lack of anything tangible, people are instead drawn to the Hollywood Walk of Fame or Mann Grauman's Chinese Theater. Yet despite the fragmentation of the film industry, Hollywood remains at least for now, the de facto capital of the film world. This is largely due to the legacy of Hollywood but really has little to do with the reality of any global monopoly on film making. But we can certainly see the cultural benefit the United States has enjoyed from the Hollywood legacy.

What is important to remember is the financial mechanisms, tax structures, investors, talent pools, etc. that were put into place that created the environment for Hollywood to exist in the first place. I think that the availability of NEA funding for video games is a step in the right direction. The reality is that the video games industry is very much still in its infancy. There is little reason to expect that without further state and federal economic incentives that video games will remain an iconic jewel of American culture and instead come to be known as an industry ruled by the China, Japan, Germany or France. If you don't believe me, go ask anyone if they still think France is the King of the movies.

Outsourcing Sensitive Material

I recently mentioned the potential benefits of outsourcing visual effects to a client of mine. After summarizing the typical cost benefit, my client lamented, "Unfortunately, outsourcing is not really an option for us since most of our customers are defense contractors. Nearly all of the materials we handle are confidential and can't leave the country". Indeed, this problem exists anytime there is any part of a visual effects contract that is sensitive such as a classified data, branded assets, intellectual property, or even a secret ad campaign. I myself have encountered this problem many times when dealing with Pixar and their peculiar brand of security and caution.

The final shot using confidential assets.

The proxy can be a close approximation...

Or the proxy can be a simple cube.

Outsourcing sensitive materials is indeed tricky, but not in the least a barrier to finding low cost alternatives to in-house production. Many studios use a technique in which proxies are used in place of sensitive materials. An example of this would be a promotional video of a new, high tech fighter plane in an exciting dog fight high above the mountains of Afghanistan. The plane, of course, is still in production and any part of the digital model, even the shape of the fuselage, could be considered highly confidential. But while the video would feature the fighter plane, the majority of the vfx budget would be consumed by assets that have nothing to do with the plane. Constructing the environment (the mountains, trees, volumetric clouds, lighting, etc.) constitutes a huge part of the shot. Another major cost is the animation, particle effects and camera work for the shot. None of these things are confidential... only the fighter plane is. Therein lies an opportunity to outsource the majority of the vfx cost to a lower cost studio.

The trick to making a proxy work is to design good proxies. In the case mentioned above, the technical lead would request a parent node in the final deliverable that contains a low resolution proxy of the aircraft. The level of detail could be anywhere from a perfect duplicate painted flat gray, to a simple cube. Since all of the animation, particle effects and lighting considerations are built around the proxy, dailies will reflect an excellent approximation of how the final shot will look. Once the technical lead is happy with the outsourced shot, the source files are brought back under the internal control of your studio. The proxy can then be replaced with the actual confidential model, and final adjustments can be made before rendering.

The overall cost benefit to using this technique is substantial. If you are producing a 15 second shot with a small, internal team of 1 3D modelers, 1 Animator, 1 Lighting/VFX artist, an Audio Engineer and a Director/Producer, you can expect to complete this shot in about 3-4 weeks, requiring 75 man days. This shot would cost roughly $39k internally, and about $17k if it were outsourced overseas. In the particular case above, fully 60% of the shot could be outsourced. This means the overall cost of this shot could be reduced to (39k)40% + (17k)60% = $25.8k for a savings of $13.2k. 

It is important to remember that the example above assumes a working relationship with a reputable outsourcing studio. Searching for and vetting outsourcing studios is a time consuming and expensive process. Furthermore, most outsourcing studios tend to specialize in certain areas and genres. However, once you have found several studios with whom you have established relationships, the savings become quite tangible.