The words "engineer" and "artist" rarely appear in the same sentence. In fact, the relationship between art and technology is often seen as tenuous if not outright hostile. But there is a long-term historic association between the two.
Leonardo Da Vinci was an inventor as well as an artist. The architect Filippo Brunelleschi created Florence's domed cathedral, one of the Renaissance world's architectural and engineering marvels. He also invented one-point linear perspective in painting, designed mechanical devices for theater, and built military fortifications.
Today the line between art and engineering is blurring even more. Artists in the fields of computer graphics and digital animation use techniques that require a good understanding of technology, and engineers who design programs and hardware used to generate visual images benefit from having backgrounds in art. People with talent or interest in both fields will find an increasing number of unique and stimulating opportunities.
The keys to animation
Kathryn Smith is chair of the John C. Hench Animation and Digital Arts Program at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California (USC, Los Angeles, CA). Richard Weinberg, PhD, a software developer who held a joint appointment with the school of engineering, created the USC computer generated imagery (CGI) and animation laboratory more than twenty years ago. "The real boom in CGI started in the early 1990s with Jurassic Park. The software that was used to build the virtual 3D dinosaurs was pivotal," Smith says.
Smith notes that the computer graphics and digital animation fields are experiencing an explosion of technological advances. Five years ago, for example, a lot of gaming imagery was bit-mapped. Now motion-capture data is used to produce virtual performances. Sensors placed at strategic points on a human actor's body capture data as the actor moves. The data is fed into algorithms, which in turn help create animated characters. The character Golum in the movie The Lord of the Rings used motion-capture techniques in an effort that Smith calls "a great combination of art and technology."
Plenty of opportunities
Smith sees tremendous opportunity in computer graphics and digital animation. "For those with good software skills and an artistic flare, there's an enormous range of jobs out there in film, the gaming industry and the Internet, in areas like R&D, 3D and 2D character animation, stop motion, motion capture and flash animation," she says. "Studios are always looking for people with technical skills to help create other worlds."
Smith points out that understanding movement is key to animation. "Motion, gesture, performance and perspective all come into play in constructing virtual characters. Any engineer interested in animation should get training in some kind of art or drawing."
Francisco Cortes oversees graphics at Fox News
Francisco Cortes is head of the graphics production unit at Fox News Channel (New York, NY), a national and international news network. He leads a team that works with the graphic designers responsible for all thirty-two shows that the network produces, as well as its website.
"I'm responsible for coordinating and testing all the channel's graphics packages, and even for making sure everything in the graphics is spelled correctly. And our guys assist the producers with breaking news." If there is a helicopter crash in Iraq, for example, he researches the event and then sits down with a designer to create a graphic scenario to accompany the story. This can be particularly challenging, because in the news business seconds count and everything must be right.
Cortes coordinates packages for the State of the Union address as well. He gathers data, like the name and state of each attending senator, and works with a member of his team to display the information.
At the moment Cortes and his group are evaluating a graphics software called Viz. "We're going to introduce it on one show, and I'm going to see whether it will help us. If we decide to go with it, our entire look will change."
Technology is a big part of Cortes' job. Fox News uses an array of software to create its graphics, including Profile, Xenomotion, Xenostore, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flint, Flame, Maya, Deko, After Effects, Google Satellite software and lnews. Animation is used to create battle scenes and illustrate army combat maneuvers.
Cortes' typical day is hectic. He gets in at 7:00 AM and quickly reads the news stories. By 7:30 he is in his first editorial meeting, where it's decided which reporters will cover what stories. At 8:00 he has another meeting that concerns graphics, and at 8:30 the breaking news stories are discussed.
His military experience helps him get through his day. Cortes, who was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn, served in the Army for seven years. He was in active service from 1996 to 1999, and in the Army National Guard from 1999 to 2003. "You learn to solve problems quickly in the military," he says.
The military also gave Cortes his start in the news business. "I started out driving tanks, but was injured on a training mission. Then I started writing the battalion's newspaper, and helped out with articles for Army Times. I loved telling people's stories, and that got me into journalism."
While he was in the military Cortes got a BA in business and management at San Diego State University (San Diego, CA). He graduated in 2001, and when he left the military he decided he wanted to stay in journalism. "I had heard a lot about Fox, and I thought I could help the channel grow. I called the newsroom manager three days a week."
His persistence paid off. Cortes started with Fox as a production assistant doing overnight tape and working with Fox Report's Shepard Smith. The journalistic skills he developed in the army came in handy, but he had also picked up computer skills there that would eventually steer his career in a new direction. "I did a lot of computer work in the military. There's a lot of computer technology in tanks."
Cortes became one of the first members of Fox News' yearlong apprentice program, which identifies promising minorities in entry-level positions and provides them with visibility, training and opportunities to advance quickly. "We met weekly with Sharri Berg [senior VP of news ops at Fox]. She was my mentor and gave me input on what I was doing. I was very fortunate, because I also got to meet Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. I got exposure that wouldn't have been possible without the program."
Jumping at opportunities and taking on new responsibilities worked in Cortes' favor. As a production assistant for Smith he found that there were problems with spelling, graphics and turnaround time, and he started helping out with graphics. When an associate producer spot opened up Cortes applied and got it. "I had much more to do. It was insane, but I loved it."
Then, in 2004, the person in charge of the graphics production unit left, and Cortes asked for the chance to take over the position. "They gave me a shot at it and liked what they saw. It's still a challenge. I have to keep on excelling and making things better."
Imageworks is hiring
Production work in film also offers many artistic and technical opportunities. Sony Pictures Imageworks (Culver City, CA) produces live-action visual effects for films like Spider-Man and Superman. The company also offers Imagemotion performance capture, recently used in the film Monster House, and makes entirely computer-generated animated films, like the recently released Open Season and Surf's Up, slated for release in June 2007. Imageworks 3D stereoscopic technology is another production pipeline.
Sande Scorda, executive director of training and artistic development with the company, says, "There are many different types of jobs at Imageworks. We're looking to fill them with people who have good technical and artistic skills, as well as good communication skills. We need people with computer science backgrounds, with a lot of emphasis on programming and an interest in computer graphics and 3D animation.
"It's a good idea to come in at the production services level, where you can get a good understanding of all the production pipelines, then choose a career path and train for that."
Imageworks is primarily a Linux shop. A team of about fifty software developers, most with PhDs, write proprietary software tools. Other positions in the company include supervisors, artists and trainers like Scorda.
All new hires attend a boot camp for one week; for production services jobs, the camp lasts a month and involves both classroom work and show-specific training. Fledgling employees learn everything they need to know for the production that they'll work on. They also take classes to explore job options and pinpoint what they want to do.
Imageworks recruits from its pool of interns, and at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group-Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH) conferences.
Lauren Matheson: movie production at Imageworks
Lauren Matheson is a lead production services technician for Surf's Up at Imageworks. She supervises a crew of seven that's responsible for all production tech support, like disk space management, daily visuals preparation and more. She works closely with the artists and production team. She also helps create new tools to streamline many common tasks.
"We use several proprietary tools, and we sometimes script our own in Perl or Python," Matheson says. "The artists launch their projects, and we make sure everything runs smoothly."
Matheson got a BS in mathematics of computation from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) in spring of 2005. She submitted her resume for a software position at Imageworks, but "I wasn't really qualified for the software position. I applied anyway to get my name in. Then they called me about my current position, and I started in June," Matheson says. "I'm always learning. We can take courses here at Imageworks, and outside classes too."
Although Matheson wasn't able to intern during college, she worked hard on skills that helped build her resume. She freelanced as a Web programmer and designer, creating graphics and logos in Photoshop, coding pages by hand and doing everything needed to take sites live. She also supervised customer service reps for the UCLA Store, and was on the Associated Students of UCLA Board of Directors leadership committee.
With the movie nearing completion Matheson finds herself excited and extremely busy. She clearly enjoys what she does. She says, "If you're interested in a certain kind of job or a certain company, just submit your resume, even if you think it's a long shot. You never know what you might find."
Gutierrez and Equihua produce cartoons with Nickelodeon
Jorge R. Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua are a true team. They are married co-creators of a new Latin-themed cartoon, El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, for Nickelodeon (Burbank, CA). Gutierrez, executive producer of the cartoon, was born in Mexico City and raised in Tijuana. Equihua was born and grew up in Tijuana. They met as students at a private Catholic high school in San Diego.
Gutierrez has a 2000 BFA and an MFA in experimental animation from the California Institute of Arts in Santa Clarita. Equihua has a 2000 BFA in graphic design from Ibero University in Tijuana, Baja California Norte. She has a passion for illustration, and has taken art courses in Los Angeles ever since graduation.
As a Cal Arts graduate Gutierrez had legal status in the U.S. for one year after graduation. Then he had to find a company to sponsor him. "I applied many places and went through a lot of rejection," he recalls. "My whole portfolio was Latin themed. I had seen Latin cartoons, but they didn't feel authentic, so I was out to change that."
He found a job at Sony in 2001, then worked for Warner Bros and Disney. In 2004 he began working with Nickelodeon on the new cartoon series.
Both Gutierrez and Equihua love popular Mexican culture Ð the Day of the Dead, Mucha Libre and the Mexican muralist tradition. Gutierrez, in fact, is related to one of the greatest Mexican muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros. "My family has a long heritage in the arts. My dad is an architect, and my sister is a graphic designer, so it's natural for me to do this."
"Everyone in my family is a doctor, but they backed me up on this," laughs Equihua.
El Tigre will pull much of its inspiration from popular Mexican culture and folklore. It is about a thirteen-year-old boy who swings between emulating the good deeds of his retired superhero father, White Pantera, and the evil deeds of his villainous grandfather, Puma Loco. White Pantera wears a Mexican wrestling mask in the Mucha Libre tradition; Puma Loco is modeled after the villains of Mexican folklore.
"What we are attempting to achieve is a digital folklore feel. Everything is a little bit off, and that is what gives it its charm," says Gutierrez, who does his 3D animation mostly in Softimage and Maya. "Every scene is hand drawn using Flash animation, PhotoShop, Illustrator and After Effects."
Flash animation, originally created for websites, has now been adopted by animators and, according to both Gutierrez and Equihua, enables anyone to make cartoons. "We just jumped on it, it's so user-friendly. It's like using clay. For $300 anyone can have a cartoon studio on their computer," says Gutierrez.
Equihua is very experienced in Flash animation. She picked it up during the dot.com era and through her graphic design classes. "Our whole crew is experienced in it. It's a great tool for animation," she says. "We have an overseas studio of animators in Ireland, a color artist who is from Wisconsin but lives all over the world and sends everything in by e-mail, and another American who lives in Korea. Back here at headquarters our line producer, a veteran of the business, keeps everyone on schedule."
Equihua explains that there are strong Aztec and Mayan graphic elements to the design of the show. "These civilizations were very shape-based, which says a lot about their natures. The Aztecs were angular and warlike, the Mayans softer and curvier."
Cartoon Network's Samuel Chi works with Flash
At the Cartoon Network (Burbank, CA), Samuel Chi works on another cartoon series, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Chi is a 2D digital animator, part of a team of about sixteen. "I'm in charge of looking at a story board, a comic-strip-style script, and animating the characters. We use Flash to move the characters and props around," Chi says.
Depending on the difficulty of a scene, it may take anywhere from several hours to a week to create. Each episode has several hundred scenes.
Chi has been using Flash animation since high school, where an art teacher introduced him to it. He has a 2005 BA in fine arts from Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, GA).
He landed a job with Turner Broadcasting System Inc (Atlanta, GA), which owns the Cartoon Network, after an on-campus interview when Turner visited his school. He saw the job posting for an animator with Flash skills at the Cartoon Network and applied.
"Flash animation makes the 2D process very efficient. Foster's is a small breakthrough for animation, because it uses Flash 100 percent, which simplifies the task. Other cartoons have used Flash, but Foster's is one of the first full-length cartoons to use it exclusively," Chi says.
As with Gutierrez and Equihua, Chi's cultural background inspires his work. "I do a lot of my own animation, and base some of it on stories that have been passed down in my family," Chi says. "Though I was born in Texas and grew up all over the country, my family is originally from China. I draw from my life experience and the way my family brought me up."
One of the technical challenges that Chi faces on his job is making sure the computer can handle the work. "We're always pushing Flash. Sometimes you have complicated, ambitious or long scenes that may test the technology, like a crowd scene with thirty people all moving at once," he says.
Chi loves working with the new technology, but confesses a love for the old cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Dexter's Laboratory. At the Cartoon Network, he says, "It's a very diverse group and a good work atmosphere. It's a lot of hard work, but very enjoyable."
Room for growth at Nvidia
Nvidia (Santa Clara, CA) makes programmable graphics processors and associated technologies. The products are used for computing, consumer electronics and mobile devices that run video games, animation, medical visualizations and CAD applications, among others. Most entry-level positions at the company call for hardware or software engineers with degrees in EE and CS. Half of the company's new hires have bachelors degrees, about 40 percent have masters, and 10 percent have PhDs.
The applications for the company's technology are broad. "Actually, any visual presentation of huge datasets is a potential application. We're starting to move into medical imaging and financial modeling, for instance, and car manufacturers are now using Nvidia hardware and high-end graphics, so there is still a lot of opportunity for growth," says Scott Sullivan, vice president of human resources. "Of course digital animation and computer graphics remain at the forefront of our business."
To find diverse applicants the company attends all major events sponsored by SWE, SHPE and NSBE at both the national and western regional levels. "We are always exploring different avenues to bring in new talent, and look to the engineering diversity groups to help us find candidates at various campuses," says Vanessa Hasten of university recruiting relations.
"The company grew 50 percent last year and 35 percent the year before," Sullivan adds. "Much of that has come through acquisitions, but there has also been a significant amount of hiring. Last year in the U.S. we hired about 100 new college graduates."
Nvidia will be taking on 250 to 300 interns this year. "A lot of our permanent hires come out of that program. We have both summer internships and co-op programs. We work with Georgia Tech, Cornell and Waterloo in Ontario, as well as a number of other schools," Sullivan says.
Nvidia's Sara Tariq programs video games
Sarah Tariq is an engineer in the developer technologies group at Nvidia. Her team works with computer architects, game developers and disk drive teams to ensure that the games run and look their best on Nvidia's hardware.
The work atmosphere at Nvidia is good, with flexible hours. "I usually get in around 9:30 AM, and work until 7:00 PM, which fits well with my schedule."
There has been a tremendous amount of change in the industry in the last year. Microsoft has introduced a new API for game programming, DirectX 10, and a new operating system, Vista. In addition, Nvidia has come out with a new generation of graphics processing units (GPUs). All of this change has Tariq and her team working to define techniques that take advantage of the new technologies.
"I define and implement new effects, and help game developers integrate these techniques into their new games. There is a lot of excitement to my work, but also a lot of deadlines. It's very challenging," says Tariq. She's worked on a number of interesting effects, developing algorithms to render realistic smoke, rain and skin. Her work on skin was presented last year at an international vision, modeling and visualization symposium in Germany as a paper, "Efficient estimation of spatially varying subsurface scattering parameters."
Tariq received a BS in computer science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lahore, Pakistan) in 2003, and an MS in computer science, with specialties in computer graphics and computer vision, from Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA) in 2005. After graduation she did an eight-month internship in Nvidia's developer technologies group, and at the end of the internship she was offered a full-time job.
Tariq is also an amateur artist, which makes her job especially satisfying. "It gives me some artistic satisfaction to know that my code creates images. It's the most rewarding kind of computer science you can do as an artist," she says. "My hobby is oil painting, and I've enjoyed painting and drawing since I was very young. But in Pakistan art isn't considered a real job."
Video game programming is a very male-dominated world, but Tariq brings her own unique experience to her job. "I provide a more artistic perspective to my work. Being a woman hasn't been a problem here," she says.
Autodesk needs tech pros across North America
Autodesk Media & Entertainment (San Rafael, CA) makes a variety of products for 3D animation, digital color grading, visual effects and compositing, editing and finishing, and workflow and media management. Its 3D animation products include Maya, 3ds Max, Viz, MotionBuilder, Gmax, mental ray and SketchBook Pro; its effects and compositing products include Inferno, Flame, Flint, Toxik and Combustion. The company also produces AutoCAD and other software solutions used in a variety of industries.
Maria Ruvo, human resources generalist at Autodesk M&E in Montreal, Québec, says that the business needs software developers, quality assurance and test engineers, and technical writers. Although the company must fill new openings from the Canadian workforce first, it does draw skilled talent from outside Canada and arranges internal transfers for employees from the U.S., Europe and Asia. Autodesk's U.S. divisions, located in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, have similar requirements.
Computer science, computer engineering or software engineering degrees are required for most positions. In some cases industry certifications along with training provided by the company may be adequate.
"Coding is done in C and C++, and we work on multiple platforms," says Ruvo. "We have great products and a very creative work environment. An artistic background is important for quality assurance and test, though not so much for development," she says.
"Autodesk values diversity in the workplace, and there is an established plan across Canada and the U.S. to ensure that."
Autodesk's Marie-Jeanne Leduc tests compositing software
Marie-Jeanne Leduc is a quality assurance specialist at Autodesk's Montreal office. She works with the compositing software Autodesk Toxik. "Compositing tools are used for visual effects in film. For example, in Pirates of the Caribbean, the 'pirates in the cage' scene was done in several different segments. An Autodesk compositer called Inferno was used to put it together and make it look seamless," Leduc says.
As a tester Leduc validates the functionality, usability and stability of Autodesk Toxik. She develops and executes testing strategies, and then reports any problems to the development team. She also tracks defects to make certain they're fixed before the product's release. "I provide feedback for future improvements, and I attend meetings to give the user's perspective to the team."
Leduc's background is in television post-production, where she learned many different programs and dealt with both artistic and technical issues. She attended the three-year Cégep de Jonquière (Québec, Canada), and graduated in 2004 with a degree in media arts and technology, specializing in television post-production. During the summer of 2000 she attended Camp des Artistes in Mount St. Anne, Québec for cinema technique, and in the summer of 2003 she interned in the post-production department of Tele-Québec (Montreal, Québec). An internship in 2004 at Autodesk, where she was on the quality assurance team and trained in Flame and Smoke software, helped her land a permanent position at graduation.
What she enjoys most is enhancing the interaction between different software programs, and learning complex theories like color space and motion estimation that help her test the product.
She suggests that those interested in her field learn many different software programs and play with them. "You need to understand the basic theory of digital compositing, and courses in computer engineering and the arts can help."
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