Vol Libre

It’s an exciting time to be a Pixar/Lucasfilm nerd, to be sure. Michael Rubin let me know—and posted about—that Loren Carpenter, co-founder of Pixar, put a copy Vol Libre, his 1980 CG fractal mountain short, online for our viewing pleasure. And it’s quite something.

Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo

The audience erupted. The entire hall was off their feet and hollering. They wanted to see it again. “They had never seen anything like it,” recalled Ed Catmull. Loren was beaming.
“There was a strategy in this,” said Loren, “because I new Ed and Alvy were going to be in the front row of the room when I was giving the talk.” Everyone at Siggraph knew about Ed and Alvy and the aggregation at Lucasfilm. They were already rock stars Ed and Alvy walked up to Loren Carpenter after the film and asked if he could start in October.
- Page 77, Droidmaker.

Though it’s only related to Loren Carpenter and not so much Vol Libre, Chapter 2 of Out of Control by Kevin Kelly has a very interesting mass-experiment by Loren Carpenter which is worth reading as well. And incidentally, this coincides with the release of the, as usual, wonderful trailer for Toy Story 1 and 2 in 3D.

Download Droidmaker for Free!

Woke up to this scoop:

Hi Michael,
Thought you might want the first notice – because of your posting, i’ve received a fair amount of email, and i’ve decided to post my book for FREE on my blog...

Its more important to me that the story of Lucasfilm be shared and circulated than for me to profit directly. So if you wanted to add that to your blog – you’d be the first!

Thanks for your kind words and support.

Michael (Rubin)

I don’t know what you’re still doing here, when you should be over there, downloading the hell out of that thing! It’s gorgeous; the full 518-page book, complete with photosRare photos I might add, plugged in many cases straight out of the Lucasfilm vault or even personal collections from the people who were there., index and whatever else you’ll find in the printed version, covering everything from Lucas’ earliest years up through the creation of ILM and its struggle to put Star Wars up on the silver screen, down through Coppola’s experiements with mobile film making, the creation of Pixar, non-linear editing, digital sound editing, the creation of the Games Group and much much more. It is in actual fact, a book about the creation of modern filmmaking (and to some extent games even) as we know it. Don’t let the technical foundation scare you off though; it’s not only accessible, but centered on the people, not the tech. It was easily one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in years.

As he does, I obviously suggest you just go ahead and buy the real thing, should you like what you see.

PS: In case you missed it yesterday, Michael Rubin appeared on Pirillo back when he was promoting the book. There’s also an interview up over at Unidentified Sound Object.

Update: Downloads have passed 10.000, and Michael has posted a breakdown of where the traffic has come from so far. There’s also a FAQ.

The Human Story of Pixar

Michael Rubin, author of Droidmaker (a fantastic look at what is essentially the genesis of modern Hollywood) reposted the ’71 Lucas interview from last week, which reminded me of The Human Story of Pixar, a celebratory panel from 2005, in which Rubin interviews Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton, Alvy Ray Smith, Ed Catmull, some of the great minds behind Pixar and just about ever single technology that make 3D graphics as we know it, possible.

You may already have seen it, but even so, and especially if you haven’t, it is a truly inspiring hour and forty.

For following up, I suggest Droidmaker of course, this interview with Rubin on the subject of Droidmaker (though I don’t normally care for Pirillo and the on-going chat on that video shows exactly when the social web has been taken too far) as well as The Pixar Touch and The Second Coming of Steve Jobs.

Update: Since this entry went up, Michael Rubin has put up Droidmaker for free download!

A Copyright Infringement Claim, Flickr and Me

C-3PO, avert your eyes

The holidays bring the amazing wonder of a fixed feed (no more raw textile markup), non-invisible pages, working search, a lifestream and some polish on the theme here and there. Hell, the about page even has my e-mail address on it, so people can go ahead and contact me directly, instead of having to go through flickr.

Now, speaking of flickr, it has now been two weeks since my sizable Star Wars collection was removed from flickr.

Lucasfilm filed a copyright infringement case with Yahoo!, telling them that the Collection I had slowly amassed over a few years, actually belonged to them, which in turn caused flickr to—in broad strokes—CTRL-A the collection and press DEL. I wake up to a flickr-mail telling me what happened, and that if I want to, I can file a counter-claim.

Of course I don’t fault Lucasfilm for filing the claim, and I don’t blame flickr for accepting the claim. In fact, I don’t really have much reason to counter-claim anything; except while the images were certainly Star Wars-related, not all of them were under Lucasfilm copyright domain…

Hm.

So I write back, asking for all the images to be made available to me, so I can sort through them and point out which ones should be left alone. But, sorry. They’re gone. Deleted. Expelled and flushed.

Yes, the collection consisted mostly of images copyrighted to Lucasfilm and I have no qualms about that. I will miss having that collection, but that’s just the images, right? What about my metadata? Titles, descriptions, tags and comments? Hell, I can’t even be sure that there weren’t images entirely unrelated to Star Wars deleted from my account; because I have no way of verifying them.

I’m sure Yahoo! has a clause somewhere stating that any and everything on flickr, including my metadata, belongs solely to them and can be used or discarded at their discretion. And you know, there’s probably a whole host of legal reasons why that’s a good idea.

Despite that, I would expect flickr to have a slightly more refined system in place for dealing with copyright claims, than merely deleting everything that seems to be related to the claim.

In any case, the bottomline is that flickr has deleted several hundreds of images from my account and I didn’t get a chance to go through them for false positives, backup my metadata (there are quite a few people I have had contact to, and I would like to retain not only those connections, but also the talks we had about for instance, the design evolution of the X-Wing) or even index the collection for any eventual counter-case.

Not only that, but despite promising ‘a timely response’, two weeks later, I still can’t get anyone at flickr to tell me how this can possibly be their best response to copyright infringement cases. How many of these do they handle every week, and this is their solution?

Really?

What happens when someone manages to fake a copyright infringement claim? Your entire flickr account disappears in a plume of smoke. Deleted. Flushed. Expelled. Shot straight into the sun. Star Wars images? Yeah, who cares? Your child’s first steps? Hope you had a backup. Wedding photos? Gee shucks…

At first I was pissed. Just from principle. That my images were deleted without objection doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in flickr. But that this is actually their system for dealing with copyright infringement claims is just amateurish. I’ve heard from others who are in the same situation, some of whom have waited even longer without hearing from the ‘senior representative’ or the ‘copyright team’.

I’m done being pissed though. Now I’m simply disappointed that not only did it happen, but for a week and a half and despite asking almost every day, I can hardly get a sign of life from flickr. I’ve been a paying member of flickr for over four years, and a staunch advocate and proponent of flickr, so somewhere, you’d think my trust was worth something?

Thanks flickr. You’re the best.

Comments are open.

Update:
Jan 2nd, 2009: Still no word from Flickr, despite several attempts on my part to contact them.