befores & afters sat down with SVP and chief creative officer at Industrial Light & Magic Rob Bredow at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 in Sydney, discussing amongst other topics the current state of the company and how ILM works in close conjunction with other Disney companies including Disney Research and PIXAR, which famously evolved from the Graphics Group, the computer department of Lucasfilm back in the 80’s.
b&a: ILM on its own does amazing R&D, but you now have the capacity of Disney Research, and Pixar’s work and WDAS’ work. In your role, what do you oversee here? How do you bring people together as part of this?
Rob Bredow: Yeah, it’s an amazing group. When you think of the graphics community that is Disney, from Disney Animation to Pixar to us and Disney Research, it may be the biggest graphics community in the world, certainly in entertainment. You may have heard we have this secret but not-so-secret meeting every year called DISGRAPH, which is Disney’s internal SIGGRAPH-type event. It’s super fun. And it is literally internal sharing between all the graphics experts and animation experts across the Disney company. And the learnings that can come out of that are pretty exciting.
Disney Research Studios, in particular, is a small but very powerful research orgnization based in Zurich. So much of what they do has direct application to what we do. Examples like our Medusa scanning system are one of the more well-known systems that were invented at Disney Research and then productized at ILM so that we can offer it to the industry as a service. We work on a lot of films that leverage Medusa.
Another example more recently is the system called Anyma, which allows us to drive a high-quality facial performance, without having to sit in a Medusa rig. You can do just a couple of cameras or a head cam and drive that. And that was another collaboration between Disney Research and ILM. So, those are a couple of well-known research projects, but we have 50 projects going on.
