Den of Geek has an interesting interview with Angus MacLane, Pixar’s supervising animator of Wall-E. He reveils plenty of good insights into the development process of Wall-E, but my favorite parts are about the software (of course):

[Interviewer] And does the software you use alter much as you go along, over a three year production cycle?

[Angus] The software for the actual execution of the film doesn’t change that much. Because you really need to lock it to one piece of software. Maybe there’ll be an update here and there, and they’ll be individual sub-programs developed. For example there was a program developed for Wall E just to get his treads to lock to the ground, so they recognise the ground and wrap around and drive as you translate him along. That was technology that was developed as an offshoot from a very similar program from Cars, in keeping the tyres on the ground. But that’s about as automated as we get. Everything else is pretty much hand animated.

I also liked this little tidbit:

[Interviewer] Finally, for anyone looking to break into animation, what advice would you give them?

[Angus] I would say be persistent, and keep trying. A friend of mine, he’s a music composer, he’d got some advice from an old pro when he started. And the old pro said to him that people who succeed in the business are not those that are the most talented, and they’re not the people that know the most people, but they are the people who are able to endure. I think that there’s something profound about that. It’s the old saying, it doesn’t happen by mistake: it’s opportunity met with preparation. So when you get the opportunity, make sure you’re prepared.

You can read the whole interview HERE.

I found this great site MoBuck.com that allows you to easily create your own motivational posters. For $1, you can download a high-resolution version, and for $14 they will send you a 8.5 x 11 inch print. It’s a lot of fun.

Here’s a Mr. T poster I made about not breaking the software build:

Lately, I’ve been reading some interesting papers from Google labs about their back-end file system, database, and algorithm framework. What I found most intriguing is the simplicity of their design. The software is highly specialized for their particular application… it follows the “do one thing and do it well” philosophy. It was nice to see that they correctly balanced simplicity against feature set.

Google File System

BigTable

Map-Reduce