By Jon Rant
It's 9 o'clock on a Wednesday evening, but from the sound of Academy Award winner Tim McGovern's voice, there are still miles to go before he sleeps. As one of the founding fathers of Sony Pictures Imageworks, headquartered at Sony Pictures Studios, the 39-year-old Senior Vice President of Creative and Technical affairs wears many hats at the company. McGovern co-runs Sony Pictures Imageworks, one of the hottest digital visual effects and computer animation firms in Los Angeles, with Bill Birrell, the company's Senior VP and Executive Producer. But above all else, he has a love for the hands-on work itself.
"When you're in the middle of a project, you lose sense of time. And when you've got several things going on at once, it's easy to get stretched." He laughs. "But in 15 years in the business, I've never been bored." Boredom would seem to be the least likely scenario in McGovern's life, given Sony Pictures Imageworks' workload and the way in which technology has radically changed film and video production. In little more than two years, the company has used Silicon Graphics computers to create the digital visual effects and computer animation for films such as Wolf, Speed, Last Action Hero, Tall Tale and My Life. And two new TriStar Pictures are in the works--Hideaway (which McGovern is visual effects supervising) and Johnny Mnemonic.
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Photo By Dave Casteel
McGovern won an Academy Award in 1991 while with MetroLight Studios for best visual effects on the movie Total Recall. But his computer graphics experience began much earlier, as a design student at the University of Illinois, when "they threw a bunch of us art students in with some engineers, just to see what would happen." "We were using an old DEC PDP11/60 minicomputer in those days," he continues. "The thing was about the size of a deep freezer....it looked like you could store meat in it. And it cost over $250,000 to get less than a MIP (millions of instructions per second)! After that, I came to L.A. and ended up working on Tron in the early '80s. We used Evans and Sutherland stuff on that movie, which was state-of-the-art then. But it took us five months to do just 55 seconds of animation."
That performance is a far cry from what Sony Pictures Imageworks is accustomed to working with today. The company relies on virtually the entire array of technology and products from Silicon Graphics, variety of powerful Indy workstations as well as several Challenge XL systems, Onyx with Reality Engine2 graphics, and Indigo2 systems. "SGI got out in front of everybody in those days, and they never looked back," McGovern says, proceeding to do just that. "I remember when I first saw a Silicon Graphics demo, a good ten years ago. All they had at that time was a graphics pipeline. You still needed a platform for the computing horsepower--I think we were using a DEC VAX then. But we saw this 3D Rubix cube rotating around, and I remember it was shading in real-time. It was obvious they were onto something special."
From then on, Silicon Graphics became the platform of choice for McGovern. "They're the leaders, no doubt about it. We've looked at other stuff, but you have to worry about a lot of compatibility and software issues. We use programs like Alias, TDI, and Wavefront all the time for those applications, Silicon Graphics is the best way to go."
Sony Pictures Imageworks is using Silicon Graphics technology not only as a graphics platform, but for communication functions as well. "We've got quite a few Indy computers here now," says McGovern. "We do a lot of compositing work with them, but we're also using the camera and video capture capabilities to do a lot of videoconferencing. We're kind of spreading around the campus here like a virus," he jokes, "so we need ways to network and stay in touch. We're on an FDDI network now, but we'll be going to ATM before too long, to get all that multimedia bandwidth. Indy's just great for that stuff."
As for the future, McGovern wonders about the ongoing journey through uncharted waters: "You know, Columbus discovered America in 1492...but it took hundreds of years for people to settle it. We landed on the moon 25 years ago....and we haven't been back since. It always takes a while for the outer fringe to merge into the mainstream."
But at least it will be the leading edge. "Movies are breaking the ground for what should be an incredible range of real-world interactive experiences," he says. "It's exciting to know that you're doing work that's leading to all that. The thing with digital effects is that you continually have the opportunity to redefine yourself, day after day." For now, however, there are deadlines to meet. McGovern sighs wearily. "I gotta go back to work now. One of our guys needs me to look at an image he's been rendering....it's on an Indy, in fact."
