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Graphics Software

LOTR Special Effects at OSCON 112

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-see dept.
gnat writes "The IT Director for Weta Digital, Peter Jackson's company doing the digital effects for the Lord of the Rings movies, is keynoting at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. They use a ton of Linux and Perl." FWIW I believe Hemos and I are speaking too, but I'm much more interested in seeing this LotR thing.
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LOTR Special Effects at OSCON More

LOTR Special Effects at OSCON

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  • You just wait...CmdrTaco and Hemos will persuade Peter Jackson to put them into the DVD Director's "SlashCut" as orcs that quickly get killed, pasted in digitally.

    I'm taking applications now to form The Campaign for Real Movie History. Who's in?

  • FWIW I believe Hemos and I are speaking too

    FWIW is an abbrevation for "For What It's Worth" - just a little code-talk word that geeks use to communicate with each other. I looked it up on AOL. Hope this helps out all the normal people reading.

    • I would hope someone who's going to Slashdot and has read down the page this far knows this. It's one of the biggest abbreviations begind BRB, IMO, and LOL. These are more of IRC type things than "coder" things anyway. "Looked it up on AOL? Well, they certainly know all the wrong times to use these there.

      Don't hurt me.
    • For all the supposed, self-described "trolls" one sees here (the people who think a "troll" is a little man under a bridge are especially amusing, and the simpletons who repetitively paste in inane garbage are boorishly amusing at times, but the fishing references are really the best), yours was quite a good one.

      The UID isn't quite high enough to really fool people but it's close enough given the +1 posting karmic bonus, which shows a sense of patience and forbearance. However, the AOL reference almost spoiled it as too obvious, and the post could have been longer. A link to a page at http://*.aol.com/* which explains "netiquette" would have been especially helpful in mitigating the obvious AOL reference and certainly would have set you apart from the -1 riff-raff. Using quotes or other HTML 0.9 markup to denote the quoted material would have also increased your overall score slightly as well. In the end, the clincher was the replies you received, which are part and parcel to any good troll.

      I give it a 7.3 out of 10 post-Siegel & Canter points. Well done, sir!

      -B

    • If your conspiracy theories are true, then I think your FAQ addenum is dead on. I can't tell if its sarcasm, but I very literally agree with it's content.
    • I didn't know that one, so I guessed and ended up reading it Elmer Fudd style: "Fwom what I Wemember" :) Cwazy Taco...

  • Perl? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fastball ( 91927 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @11:23PM (#3643251) Journal
    use LOTR::Ringwraith

    Get that module to CPAN stat! I want it! ;)

    • Re:Perl? (Score:1, Redundant)

      by 56ker ( 566853 )
      Could someone explain this joke for someone who just doesn't get it?
      • From perldoc -q use:
        Imports some semantics into the current package
        from the named module, generally by aliasing cer-
        tain subroutine or variable names into your package.
        I guess that may even be more confusing :(

        • Re:Perl? (Score:1, Offtopic)

          by 56ker ( 566853 )
          Yeah it is - got any idea how to stop a person who has a troll account from using all their five mod points (when they get them) to deliberately mod all your recent posts down?

  • I'm glad Taco & Hemos have made up... (Score:4, Funny)

    by schwatoo ( 521485 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @11:24PM (#3643255)
    But I didn't realise they weren't speaking.

  • Gandolf did look a bit like RMS (Score:3, Funny)

    by JeffGB ( 265543 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @11:29PM (#3643285)
    I always thought that Gandolf looked a bit like Richard Stallman.
    Maybe it was just the beard.
    Lord of the Token Ring [userfriendly.org]
  • All your LOTR Graphics are belong to OSCON. Enough said.

  • Movie magic (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 )
    The zenith of movie special effects was reached several years ago by Dan Piponi and his crew. What's happened in the interim? Well, Titanic won the Oscar for special effects. That's got to tell you something about the sad state of affairs in movies today.
    • I don't follow anything Hollywood, so I had to hit google to find out just who this megastar "Dan Piponi" was (and you didn't mention any of his films, as if I'm supposed to read the ending credits). Anyway, here [freebsd.org] is a very interesting message - this is Dan Piponi on the freebsd-chat mailing list explaining how they did The Matrix. This message is cool because (1) you can meet all sorts of interesting people on the Internet, (2) it shows that FreeBSD's mailing lists are excellent (even if they're a bit too high-volume to follow continuously) and (3) it shows how excellent FreeBSD's Linux binary compat is. I've never run accross a Linux binary that FreeBSD couldn't handle.

    • Re:Movie magic (Score:3, Informative)

      by donglekey ( 124433 )
      That was certainly not the Zenith of visual effects.

      John Gaeta was the visual effects supervisor for the Matrix, if that is what you are talking about. So it was his crew, the artists and the developers. Dan Piponi is head of R&D. It is a simbiotic relationship, don't pretend that one doesn't need the other.

      Manex won the Oscar for visual effects for the Matrix.

      That wasn't the same year (Obviously) as Titanic. Titanic was before that, not in the inerim. In fact Manex won back to back Oscars for What Dreams May Come and The Matrix, so Titanic was actually in 1997.

      Star Wars Episode I should have won for visual effects, but it didn't because the movie was shit.

      And finally, it tells us nothing about the sad state of affais in movies today.
    • The special effects in The Matrix were pretty run of the mill. SW: TPM had much better visual effects (orders of magnitude more original and technically sophisticated). Sadly, since nobody likes George Lucas, ILM got screwed.

  • O'Reilly conferences are laughably expensive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @11:34PM (#3643306) Homepage Journal
    $1024 for a conference pass - that is absolutely rediculous given than many of the people who make Open Source happen don't have the backing of a company that could cover this cost.

    Even the 65% off that students get leaves the student with a hefty price-tag, I know that during my student days every pound (went to uni in the UK) was valuable and there was no way I could justify spending over $300 to get into a conference just for the privilige of speaking to others who have also had to fork out (I find the people I meet at conferences are often much more interesting than those speaking at them).

  • I just wanted to be annoying and point out the fact that this is old news. that is all!

  • Check this out. (Score:2, Funny)

    by dingo ( 91227 )
    I came across this [diagon.org] the other day and thought it was really funny, make sure you read it in order though.
  • Finally! Peter Jackson, Hemos & CmdrTaco all in one room.

    Which is the best way to destroy a troll? Sunlight or (Score:-1, Troll)?
  • In the back of O'Reilly books tear out those postcards. Write your name in big letters on the back then laminate. This is the secret to getting in for free.

  • Perl? What for? (Score:3, Funny)

    by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2002 @01:06AM (#3643565)
    I wonder what they were using Perl for.

    Then it hit me, they must be using this [wired.com] to replay dvd versions of production tests under linux :)

    • At Weta, they use a variety of different boxen.. Linux (mostly), but also Mac, Irix, and a bunch of other stuff...

      and after personally talking with one of the IT dept managers at Weta, I found they use a lot of perl for the same thing that most of us use perl for... writing cgi scripts which drive their intranet.. because intranets are cross-platform.
  • They use a ton of Linux and Perl.

    Is this the same linux that isn't worth a Quicktime [slashdot.org] player? I thought that was just for those bottom-feeding free-as-in-beer types who never spend any money. Please pardon my seething sarcasm. Maybe more coffee will help. Sigh.

  • FWIW I believe Hemos and I are speaking too, but I'm much more interested in seeing this LotR thing.

    You believe you're speaking? You're not even sure if you're speaking or not? Damn, I'd hate to have to sit in on that speech if you do end up speaking.

    "Yea, and, ummmm... (come on, think technology you idiot) So, this one time Hemos and I met Asia Carrera. That was cool."
  • Somehow the image of the handheld device and consumer electronics celebrities lecturing on workstations and computation farms doesn't seem to fit.
  • They measure them by weight? I always thought they were measured by lines of code.
  • Perl is trying to do too much with regular expressions. Why not just take the thing one notch up and allow for LL(kN) grammars?

    That's the approach ANTLR (htp://www.antlr.org) uses for its lexical analizers.

    Too complex? Just look at the examples in Wall's article and decide by yourselves.

    Juanco
    --

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