I was in Toronto this week, and I got a chance to have dinner with a bunch of guys - some old friends, some new - with several decades of experience in animation film and TV, between us. We spent a couple rounds of drinks regaling one another with horror stories about productions gone wrong: why does it seem like everybody makes the same mistakes, trying to set up a pipeline? Part of it seems to be the relative immaturity of the industry - it just hasn't been around long enough - nor does it stay still long enough - for "best practices" and standards to emerge. In some ways, this is a good thing - there's a lot of competitive advantage to be had in pipeline, and companies that "coast" are going to find their work outsourced to someone better/faster/cheaper. But for all of it's importance, building pipelines doesn't seem to get the same attention as other aspects of the industry - aside from one or two "Birds of a Feather" meetings at SIGGRAPH, there are virtually no discussion groups, or papers or panels or even online discussion groups, dedicated to the art and science of building production pipelines. Larger studios usually have a pipeline architect (qualified or not!), but smaller studios often relegate it to "the tech guy" - maybe an artist who does some scripting, too, or the IT guy who maintains the email and DNS servers. Worse yet is the studio who gets a consultant - one that hasn't actually worked on a production, no less - to come in and really screw things up; I'm in the middle of fixing one of those, now...

Logotherapy

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. - Albert Camus

Most of the work in making a film, or a game, is iterative - constantly refining every aspect of it, tweaking and adjusting and refining all the details. If that process of iteration - the steps by which each aspect of the project is refined - is not itself refined, then this can be a tedious and labored process. The usual motivations for refining a pipeline are monetary - if you can shorten the iterative loop, you can get more loops (a better product) in the same amount of time, or a set number of loops in a shorter time: either of which increases the 'efficiency of improvement'.

Pipeline engineering is a kind of meta-aesthetic activity: the process of refining a process. But it can also have a huge aesthetic aspect - just like any tool can be made rough and clumsy, or refined and elegant. I've seen a lot of pipelines, a lot of workflows, that were inefficient or inelegant, usually in the name of expediency -that's not only a flawed way of thinking, it's downright inelegant.

First things First

How do people manage to work together on large, creative, aesthetically-driven projects? Games and animated films and visual effects projects are - more often than not - the result of the combined efforts of a lot of creative, technical, and artistic people. They also produce a lot more wasted effort, wasted time, pain and suffering than they need to - more often than not.

Mostly, that's what I plan to write about - how these things get done, the mistakes that get made, the improvements that happen along the way, what's happening in the digital media industries, what's happening to the people that work in it, and where I think it's all headed.

Other topics will include things like: running a business, the perils of consulting, dealing with difficult people, venture capital, the difference between activity and results, why it's hard to get a good pizza in Hawaii. You are invited to join the conversation.