Jump to content

A Pixar Joke or an Industry Declaration


3D-Pangel

Recommended Posts

I watched the Pixar movie "Soul" and noticed this at the very end of the movie.

 

1809780025_PixarDeclaration.thumb.JPG.f7d1dd893607c6a76e63314c8d0086cd.JPG

 

So interesting that Pixar was able to make a mainstream, full length animated movie while under a pandemic lock-down that touched on some very complex themes while still being highly entertaining.  Essentially, something this challenging is a highly collaborative exercise but it was accomplished with everyone still working from home.

 

So...it begs a question:  If Pixar can do it (and do it well), does that mean it can be done again?   Is this tag line at the very end of the movie credits (where most people from home are no longer watching) added for humor only or was it  a declaration of things to come for only those people who would watch the entire credits: namely people already in the industry?  I mean, most companies are seriously thinking about the savings on commercial real estate/utilities/taxes by having their employees stay home permanently.    Why would Pixar be any different?

 

Let's assume the answer is that it is a declaration of things to come.  What does this mean to the industry?  Well, it means that talent can be accessible from ANYWHERE.  It means that freelance VFX and animation artists do not need to lead nomadic existences relocating to various studios across the world in the search of work.  High speed VPN internet connection and Zoom is all you need.  You don't need to move which is a plus for the artist.  It is also a plus for the companies because it is a lot easier and cheaper to recruit talent if you don't have to offer enough compensation to convince people to relocate to high cost of living areas like California or New York.

 

Humorous tag line or a hint of things to come?  Time will tell.

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

Link to comment

Well, I dont know how true is that or what is the point of that credit, but I think its very possible to do things from home and do them great. Its all about trust in people you employ and of course, its about the employ to be honest to do his job fairly and responsibly. Communication can be a bit hard but again, its manageable. For me personally, home office was great due to many reasons one of those is the benefit of not having to spend time for travel and save some time and energy, which in my case is something I struggle the most as I live with J-Pouch, but when people don't understand your problem and you you look healthy while dying inside, its a problem. Unfortunately that was the case at Maxon and I did not have much choice but simply had to quit and move on and trust me it was not an easy decision. Will this haunt me I don't know, I just hope for good health. 

 

What disturbs me is the fact that some CEO's are so paranoid that they are literally spying hard on their employees and doing horrible things especially in USA. Luckily I think in EU most of those practices are illegal. Having CEO's being so paranoid is really unhealthy for any working environment, I truly feel sorry for some people that need to deal with those idiots. If you would ask me, as long as you bring results on time, while those results are good, I really would not care when you work, where and so on. But again, there are definitely some benefits when you work from office to. Communication is usually much better because you can talk with people face to face and we all know that writing msg's is not always the healthiest way to communicate as we as humans for some reasons perceive most of the things in negative way, especially when they are written. So, in the end I think its doable but for things to work you need a good functioning management and team.

 

 

Link to comment

Apparently this last season of Star trek Discovery's post production was all done from home and it's very complicated effects laden show so it's possible. On much smaller scale, I did the second season fo of TV show's animation 6 years ago from my home studio and it went so much better than sitting in an office with people around me all day and then having to do most of the work at home with no distractions anyway. From my point of view there is no reason to do it any other way! 

Link to comment

I wouldn't be surprised if this pandemic showed the world just how much can (and perhaps should) be done at home, and how much office space any business like ours actually needs. I suspect a lot of previously 'office-team' type people will go work from home in the end, pandemic or not - after all us freelancers and trainers have been doing it fine that way for years.

 

But there is a big difference between that, and having a monitored camera trained on your workstation for the entire duration. Screw that ! I imagine that's out of order in most peoples' books, but definitely is in mine ! I model primarily in pants and a dressing gown - and there is no need to  a) change that for anyone or b) inflict it on my managers or students !

 

 🙂

 

CBR

Link to comment
3 hours ago, Igor said:

Well, I dont know how true is that or what is the point of that credit, but I think its very possible to do things from home and do them great. Its all about trust in people you employ and of course, its about the employ to be honest to do his job fairly and responsibly. Communication can be a bit hard but again, its manageable. For me personally, home office was great due to many reasons one of those is the benefit of not having to spend time for travel and save some time and energy, which in my case is something I struggle the most as I live with J-Pouch, but when people don't understand your problem and you you look healthy while dying inside, its a problem. Unfortunately that was the case at MAXON and I did not have much choice but simply had to quit and move on and trust me it was not an easy decision. Will this haunt me I don't know, I just hope for good health. 

 

What disturbs me is the fact that some CEO's are so paranoid that they are literally spying hard on their employees and doing horrible things especially in USA. Luckily I think in EU most of those practices are illegal. Having CEO's being so paranoid is really unhealthy for any working environment, I truly feel sorry for some people that need to deal with those idiots. If you would ask me, as long as you bring results on time, while those results are good, I really would not care when you work, where and so on. But again, there are definitely some benefits when you work from office to. Communication is usually much better because you can talk with people face to face and we all know that writing msg's is not always the healthiest way to communicate as we as humans for some reasons perceive most of the things in negative way, especially when they are written. So, in the end I think its doable but for things to work you need a good functioning management and team.

 

SMUG CEO BRAGS ABOUT TRACKING HIS WORKERS | #grindreel #activtrak - YouTube

 

WORKERS PHOTOGRAPHED AT HOME EVERY 5 MINUTES (always on webcams) | #grindreel #sneek - YouTube

Igor,

 

Very sorry to hear about that storm in your life.  I hope that you are now doing better both work wise and health wise.  

 

I actually have been a remote employee for Cisco for about 10 years.  At that time, Cisco didn't even like having people outside of San Jose - let alone working from home in New England.  But the situation was such that, as a manager, all my direct reports were in other parts of the world, I was always traveling (I just spent 50 days working a crises at one of our factories) and they need the office space at their campus in Massachusetts.  So they actually asked me if I could work from home in New Hampshire.  Hmmm....the Mass offices were a 50 minute commute and if I worked from home I wouldn't have to pay Mass  state income tax (5.9%) as NH has no state income tax.  I made my decision in 0.09 milliseconds.

 

But, being a "remote employee", put a target on my back.  I constantly had to prove my worth every day all the way up to the VP's and above.  Every phone call was answered no matter when the call was made (remember that San Jose is 3 hours behind the East coast.  Call me at 10PM -- I answer).  When you did call me, you did not hear birds chirping, ocean waves, the wind blowing, or car sounds in the background.  I was in my office.   Nothing was ever late and the lines of communication were never clearer.  But still, with all the frequency of an un-loved season, I would have to defend why I was a remote employee to the Senior VP (remember, they asked me to be remote).  Finally, there was a big crises in Malaysia.  My VP asked me to go over there and figure it out and then stay to fix it.  It was a 3 month stint.  After that, I was told that I was no longer on the radar. 

 

Then Covid hit and we all became remote employees (and that won't end until next June).  Guess what?  The company did NOT fall into ruin.  Things were getting done.  Cisco has "campuses" through-out the US.  San Jose building are being sold.  The 3 buildings in Massachusetts are being sold and only 1 is being leased back to house Cisco employees (well...actually the product development labs more than the people). You can only do that if you formalize a work-from-home strategy.

 

So management does evolve when they finally accept that people are working.  If you are a professional, you don't take anything for granted.  You are an "at-will" employee which simply means your job is NOT guaranteed.   You always need to show your worth whether in an office or at home. 

 

Once management sees that, if they are smart, they will trust you in that arrangement as they have much to gain too.  

 

Dave,

 

P.S.  Work from home does NOT work for new hires.  They need to meet people, put names with faces and learn the culture.  So I don't think 100% remote is a good idea.  But 3 days a week!  Hey...that works!

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

Link to comment
12 minutes ago, Cerbera said:

I model primarily in pants and a dressing gown.

 

 🙂

 

CBR

Okay....TOO MUCH INFORMATION!  That just shredded my image of you.

 

Honestly, prior to that comment,  given my high esteem for your talents, this is how I imagine just a simple thing like your desk chair!

 

image.thumb.png.07d4ff9d4415626d58bfb8683ecd1e56.png

 

Well...at least you said you were wearing pants!

 

Dave

 

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

Link to comment
On 1/18/2021 at 6:34 AM, 3D-Pangel said:

So interesting that Pixar was able to make a mainstream, full length animated movie while under a pandemic lock-down that touched on some very complex themes while still being highly entertaining.  Essentially, something this challenging is a highly collaborative exercise but it was accomplished with everyone still working from home.

 

 

If you have Disney+ you can watch one of the "Extras". This details exactly what they did. They just all remoted in to the main servers, or their actual machine, at work.

 

Weta here in NZ did the same thing last year and everyone worked from home. And now Weta is looking to move as much as they can into AWS directly.

 

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/weta-digital-goes-all-in-on-aws/

 

I think this will definitely be used for future productions since no one is travelling anywhere for the next few years. So yes I do think this will be great for Artists who will now be able to work from anywhere as long as they have a high speed fibre connection. But there will need to be a lot of trust involved due to the nature of the work, and the artist will still need to be setup with the equipment they need.

 

I have been working remotely for over 12 years now. But I have never needed to remote log into any special hardware.

Link to comment
2 hours ago, kbar said:

 But there will need to be a lot of trust involved due to the nature of the work, and the artist will still need to be setup with the equipment they need.

Trust issues with the employee center around "are they doing the work" and those are quite easy to figure out.  In fact, most managers should already have a pretty good idea if their direct reports are to be trusted or not with remote work.  You will know pretty quickly if they are not getting the work done.  Just look out for: late with completing assignments, too many excuses, you can't reach them during normal working hours, they take too long to return phone calls or text messages, and my personal favorite, when you do call them they sound like they are outside rather than in an office.  Now if a direct report is always asking for more to do, if they step up, if you hear about them helping others....then trust is established.  

 

I would tell my direct reports that trust is given automatically, but you will rule the day that it is lost because the last place you want to be is "on my radar".  Not hearing from me every day is a good thing because that means you have earned my trust.  Just because you work from home does not mean that you can hide from everyone the fact that you are not getting work done.  Everyone, both peers and managers,  figure out who is working and who is not.  Slackers cannot hide forever and ultimately they get managed either up or out.

 

So should companies move to a WFH model, I believe trusting the employees will sort itself out over time. But honestly, those who can not be trusted is really no more than 5% of the workforce as most people want to work and value their job.

 

Now if you are concerned about them stealing IP, well....everything can be tracked.  When you connect to the companies servers, the data you download is tracked. When your laptop connects to a non-company server....every transaction is tracked.  Downloading restricted material to a USB drive will be flagged.  Email and text attachments are tracked.  Uploads are tracked.  Screen captures are flagged (what was the active app at the time of the screen capture). Even if you do it off line, that transaction is still logged on your machine.  That log can either be uploaded the next time you connect to the companies server or stored for forensic analysis later.  And companies can scan those transactions at will and without you knowing it at any time.   And even if you are an IT wiz who thinks they can cover their tracks, there are better wizards who can figure out what you did (as a manager of a bunch of engineers who built and tested the servers we sell, I have seen it all).  

 

Big companies have these experts. AWS has these experts for those companies using their network because the last thing they want is bad press about the loss of IP on their network.

 

So over time, ALL trust issues will be resolved.  Honestly, I think WFH may become standard for everyone. 

 

My heart goes out to all those working in the commercial real estate market.

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

Link to comment
6 hours ago, 3D-Pangel said:

So over time, ALL trust issues will be resolved.

 

The trust issue I am referring to is secrecy and NDAs. Making sure what you are working on does not leak out. So people need to be trusted that they work in a secure location where anyone walking by can't see their screen (even in a flatting/house sharing situation). Or that they are trusted not to show anyone who pops by any of the work they are doing (not so much of an issue in these times of Covid though). Most likely this will mean studios will hire people who they have used before, or people who have a good reputation in the industry already. And it is less likely that a junior will be hired in to work on any important shots. Or if they do they will be working on something so removed from the actual final result that it won't matter if it gets seen.

Link to comment
4 hours ago, kbar said:

 

The trust issue I am referring to is secrecy and NDAs. Making sure what you are working on does not leak out. So people need to be trusted that they work in a secure location where anyone walking by can't see their screen (even in a flatting/house sharing situation). Or that they are trusted not to show anyone who pops by any of the work they are doing (not so much of an issue in these times of Covid though). Most likely this will mean studios will hire people who they have used before, or people who have a good reputation in the industry already. And it is less likely that a junior will be hired in to work on any important shots. Or if they do they will be working on something so removed from the actual final result that it won't matter if it gets seen.

That is an important point. 

Link to comment
11 hours ago, kbar said:

 

The trust issue I am referring to is secrecy and NDAs. Making sure what you are working on does not leak out. So people need to be trusted that they work in a secure location where anyone walking by can't see their screen (even in a flatting/house sharing situation).

Okay....people should not be doing look development work for the next Avatar sequel from an internet cafe in the middle of Wellington.  That is just common sense and you senior people trusted with that level of IP know that. But I think those lines were probably already crossed long before the pandemic as well.  I mean, how many people do work on airplanes? That is why they have those polarized privacy screens you can put on your laptop to minimize the potential for on-lookers.  You can't see anything unless you are the user looking straight on at the screen.  Even when I am in an airport lounge, I keep my back to the wall when I open my laptop so no one can glance at my screen from behind.  

 

Standardizing a work-from-home policy is not going to increase or decrease that behavior as I would submit it has probably been going on all along. It comes with the territory once you give the employee a laptop.  If you really want to keep something secure, the work is kept only a private network and the only access is through a workstation at the office....but they are the corner cases.

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

Link to comment
×
×
  • Create New...

Copyright Core 4D © 2023 Powered by Invision Community