Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Well, I have left Japan, and while everyone else is enjoying the Super Bowl, I am now in Australia, at another conference.Today I had the pleasure to hear filmmakers talk about their successes, and how IBM helps the movie industry.

Khoa Do

At one extreme was Khoa Do, independent filmmaker. After acting in movies asideMichael Caine and Billy Zane, he decided to become his own director. He started a project to help seven disadvantaged youths from a poor drug-ridden section of Sydney, by having them act in his first full-length film.Armed with only an IBM laptop and small budget, he made the film called "The Finished People" that had critical acclaim.

The film was a success, and many of the disadvantaged youths have gone on to act in other movies. In 2005, Khoa Do was named "Young Australian of the Year".

Thanks to IBM technology, filmmaking is now accessible to a wider number of aspiring wanna-be directors. It is no longer necessary to be part of a large film studio with a multi-million dollar budget to tell your story.

Xavier Desdoigts

At the other extreme, was Xavier Desdoigts, director of technical operations at Animal Logic, the Computer Graphics (CG) arthouse that produced special effects of movies like "The Matrix", "House of Flying Dragons" and "World Trade Center". They started with producing digital effects for TV commercials, like this one forCarlton Draught Beer.

With the support of a large film studio and multi-million dollar budget, Animal Logic now boasts the 86th most powerful "Supercomputer" based on IBM BladeCenter technology, with over 4000 servers connected into a cluster, for making the movie "Happy Feet". The movie took four years to make, with over 500 people, of 27 different nationalities. It was the first CG movie made in Australia, and has been well-received by audiences worldwide.

Mr. Desdoigts gave out some interesting facts and figures about the movie:

• While visually stunning on the big screen, each frame is only 1.4 Megapixel, about the same resolution as most camera phones.
• In one scene, there are 427,086 penguins all appearing on frame.
• Mumble, the lovable lead character, is made up of over 6 million feathers.
• As many as 17 dancers were "motion-captured" to choreograph the tap-dancing and character interaction segments.
• Only one system admin was needed to manage this entire server farm. (IBM Systems Director technology makes this possible)
• The movie consumed 103 TB of disk space, backed up to 595 LTO tape cartridges.
• An estimated 17 million CPU-hours were needed for all the processing and rendering.

Rather than talking about technology for technology sake, these filmmakers showed how technology couldbe put to use, in a practical sense, to provide the world something of value.

technorati tags: IBM, filmmaker, film industry, Khoa Do, Michael Caine, Billy Zane, Xavier Desdoigts, Animal Logic, Happy Feet, Systems Director, LTO, BladeCenter