After the fact reporting: George Lucas Keynote Interview

George's keynote interview Monday was interesting from the moment the doors opened-- people were running to the front of the auditorium like it was a general admission U2 concert. It took a little while for people to start asking Dennis, Rob, and John for photos and autographs, and once people started asking, sheepishly, more and more people went up for photo ops-- it did get a little hectic up there. It looked like Dennis was enjoying it the most.

I hadn't realized how much time it would take to fill everyone in on Siggraph's developments over the last year. Interesting tidbit-- I did not know that Siggraph membership includes on-line programming courses and streaming video of all conference sessions. I will get a membership (I'm currently only an ACM member). The awards took a long time due to the Japanese researcher's speech-- not a minute or two reviewing old work and thanking people, but a full review of all of his research and influences-- it felt like 30 minutes, but was probably 10-15. [SNORE]

George's interview answers included a few gems, for sure. Referring to Ron Fedkiw's water work (Ron received an award before the interview), George said something to the effect of "His water looks so good, it'll make you wet." Later, talking about Star Wars, he mentioned that many shots are "just done on a Mac." I imagine Cliff's eyes went wide at that point.

I'm always impressed by his confidence while at the same time admitting that he does not understand much of the technology. Answering a question late in the interview about the biggest hurdles to overcome in the vfx industry, he said he could not think of any specific effect hurdle to overcome in terms of creating realistic images, but that usability is a large hurdle-- he mentioned ILM's in-progress pre-viz tool and his hope that somebody with more artistic than technical skills could use the toolkit to rough out sequences.