By: Stephen Kindel

When you look at an advertisement for a new job, do you really know what you are looking at? In a shrinking economy, where companies struggle to maintain market share, let alone grow it, many jobs are what a friend of mine describes as “know who” jobs. That is, the condition of your employment is based upon the size and number of accounts you can bring with you, or take away from a competitor, usually the company you worked at before. Your potential new employer is not interested in you or your skills per se, but rather, in whom you can bring along with you as clients or customers. Almost all sales jobs today are know-who jobs, as are many positions in law (try getting a job at a new law firm without the ability to bring along former clients), and particularly, in the financial services industry. The ability to bring along your “book” of business is what is likeliest to land you a position, and not your knowledge of the industry. Continue reading →

At Monday’s Pixar Animation Studios Case Study at the Content Theater, the company focused on stereoscopic production and presentation.

The packed event, sponsored by Sony and RealD’s 4K 3D projection system, offered glimpses of Pixar’s first experiments with 3D, included re-created scenes from “Toy Story” and “Ratatouille,” adding new 3D effects as well as extended sequences from Pixar’s upcoming stereoscopic release, “Up.”

Bob Whitehill, stereoscopic supervisor, and Josh Hollander, director of stereoscopic production, shared some of preparation for the May 29 release of “Up” and the Oct. 2 premiere of the stereoscopic versions of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2.”

In re-creating the “Toy Story” films, Hollander said, Director John Lasseter worked with the stereoscopic team on creative and technical issues that arose when taking a show designed for 2D projection and adapting it to 3D.

Significant technical consideration arise from the need to render images for the left and right “eye” simultaneously because of the damage to the stereoscopic effect that could result from even extremely minute changes at the pixel level if the two perspectives are rendered separately.

Looking at the stereoscopic world from an artistic perspective, Whitehill noted that Pixar’s initial testing helped Pixar filmmakers define a stereoscopic aesthetic using concepts such as “point of interest” and its relation to the “point of conversion” and “depth budget” that became integral to the decisions made by co-directors Pete Doctor and Bob Peterson when creating “Up.”