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Ed Catmull is and always has been a scumbag. He was implicated in and unrepentant for his role in the wage-fixing scandal for which Disney paid a $100M settleme

Ed Catmull is and always has been a scumbag. He was implicated in and unrepentant for his role in the wage-fixing scandal for which Disney paid a $100M settlement. He almost certainly knew about and covered-up/minimized his co-founder John Lassiter's decades of sexual harassment of female employees leading to his ultimate exit. Finally, from my several interactions with him at Disney and Pixar he was extremely dismissive of non-traditional approaches to graphics research (especially ML/AI-based approaches) and his approach to leadership was almost a complete 180 from the self-styled guru he presented himself as in Creativity Inc. Perhaps a great researcher and businessman but definitely a low-tier human.

galangalalgol 4y ago
And now Lassiter is making stuff again?! I watched Luck with my kid, thought it a bit odd and went to see who was involved, and wait what? I feel annoyed I gave even one increment to the watch count of his work. It seems like the kids film industry is even more toxic than the normal film industry, which is impressive. Was that your experience?
- dagmx 4y ago
  definitely not more toxic. It’s the same issues though of power corruption, and male dominance. This applies the same to the video game industry and the visual effects side of the CG industry as well. I’d say it applies to pretty much every industry in general (feel free to sub out male dominance with whatever the majority demographic is). The difference is that they don’t have the wholesome image of “for kids” to hide it. When a lawyer is scummy, we think it’s par for the course. When an animator is scummy, it’s shocking. When it reality both should be unacceptable. That’s not to excuse it, or appeal to whataboutism, it’s just to say it’s not worse or better. It just is because it’s a societal issue that get revealed as society moves forward. The level of harassment female employees were expected to stay quiet about has changed. Hence why Lasetter got the boot from Pixar. Of course, you can’t trust the Elisson family to be very moral, so they hired him as soon as they found out he was available. A lot of women , including very prominent actresses, stopped working with Skydance after that.
antegamisou 4y ago
> he was extremely dismissive of non-traditional approaches to graphics research (especially ML/AI-based approaches) Not necessarily a poor decision.
- ml-anon 4y ago
  By necessity a huge part of the rendering pipeline is augmented and assisted by ML based approaches. AI models touch >50% of the frames you see in almost every film released and that number is only growing. So yeah, a pretty damn poor decision that would have relegated pixar to the past, if anyone actually still listened to that dinosaur.
  - antegamisou 4y ago
    So you're talking about the rendering part, which has obviously seen tremendous improvement from AI-based techniques e.g. neural material rendering, ReSTIR etc. Since Catmull is known for contributions computer animation research, where the application of ML hasn't exactly thrived, at least not yet, to the same extent as rendering has, I assumed you were talking about geometry processing.
mmmm2 4y ago
The villain in Big Hero Six is likely based on him.

galangalalgol 4y ago

And now Lassiter is making stuff again?! I watched Luck with my kid, thought it a bit odd and went to see who was involved, and wait what? I feel annoyed I gave even one increment to the watch count of his work. It seems like the kids film industry is even more toxic than the normal film industry, which is impressive. Was that your experience?

dagmx 4y ago
definitely not more toxic. It’s the same issues though of power corruption, and male dominance. This applies the same to the video game industry and the visual effects side of the CG industry as well. I’d say it applies to pretty much every industry in general (feel free to sub out male dominance with whatever the majority demographic is). The difference is that they don’t have the wholesome image of “for kids” to hide it. When a lawyer is scummy, we think it’s par for the course. When an animator is scummy, it’s shocking. When it reality both should be unacceptable. That’s not to excuse it, or appeal to whataboutism, it’s just to say it’s not worse or better. It just is because it’s a societal issue that get revealed as society moves forward. The level of harassment female employees were expected to stay quiet about has changed. Hence why Lasetter got the boot from Pixar. Of course, you can’t trust the Elisson family to be very moral, so they hired him as soon as they found out he was available. A lot of women , including very prominent actresses, stopped working with Skydance after that.

antegamisou 4y ago

> he was extremely dismissive of non-traditional approaches to graphics research (especially ML/AI-based approaches) Not necessarily a poor decision.

ml-anon 4y ago
By necessity a huge part of the rendering pipeline is augmented and assisted by ML based approaches. AI models touch >50% of the frames you see in almost every film released and that number is only growing. So yeah, a pretty damn poor decision that would have relegated pixar to the past, if anyone actually still listened to that dinosaur.
- antegamisou 4y ago
  So you're talking about the rendering part, which has obviously seen tremendous improvement from AI-based techniques e.g. neural material rendering, ReSTIR etc. Since Catmull is known for contributions computer animation research, where the application of ML hasn't exactly thrived, at least not yet, to the same extent as rendering has, I assumed you were talking about geometry processing.

mmmm2 4y ago

The villain in Big Hero Six is likely based on him.