George Lucas keynote at SIGGRAPH 2005
Xoanon @ 1:52 pm EST

From CinemaTech: I arrived at the LA Convention Center this afternoon just in time to find a seat in the back of the hall for George Lucas' opening keynote at SIGGRAPH 2005. (No special seating for media or bloggers - boo hoo.) Lucas is introduced as "the father of digital cinema" and then a short film on his career lauds him as "a tireless champion of digital projection... (Lucas) talks a bit about Peter Jackson's visual effects shop, Weta Digital, which he visited recently. "Weta is like ILM was 20 years ago." He invited Jackson to come see ILM now, and see if that's really the direction he wants Weta to go. Referring to ILM, he says: "A big corporation has its downside. Companies are kind of like sharks. If they don't swim, they die. You either have to grow and get bigger and bigger, or you begin to collapse. I think ILM, we've all agreed, has reached a level that we want to stick with. We don't want to get any bigger. We're the oldest, we're the largest, we're the most advanced. And that's a fun position to be in." He says if a studio or someone else wanted to build a bigger shop, ILM wouldn't necessarily try to compete. [More]