Interview of Daniel Gregoire, Board Chairman of Halon Entertainment

0:01 This is Silicon Valley Tech, Behind The Scenes, a podcast hosted by Shawn Flynn and Sunil S Ranka. Here's where we talk to the real heroes to find out how decisions are made and how they're executed to create the thriving businesses of tomorrow. George was in Australia shooting Star Wars Episode III and had many outstanding sequences that needed to be visualized. And so George sent me out to Stephen's house on a laptop with some special software that ILM had designed that was sort of a non-linear editor that they had custom built for Maya at the time. And I spent several weeks either at Stephen's office in Los Angeles or at Stephen's guest house in the Hamptons, essentially sitting one-on-one with him, banging out sequences for Star Wars Episode III. This is the president and chairman of Halon Entertainment, Daniel Gregoire, who is a lead-in-edge pre-visual director and supervisor. And today we talk about the technology that has changed in Hollywood, Bollywood, and some of the exciting stories that Daniel's had with his experiences with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and what he thinks is going to happen to the entertainment world post-COVID-19. This and much more on today's episode, so let's get started.

1:20 Dan, thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley Tech. Now, you've had this amazing background, but before we even talk about your career up to this point, I got to ask, was there any childhood experiences or any events that happened to you when you were young that kind of shaped your mindset, kind of who you are today? Sure. Thanks for having me, Sean. And I'm happy to be here and talk about the past, the present, and the future. So yeah, I mean, I've given several presentations. In fact, I give quite a few talks a year, at least I did last year. This just slowed down a little bit. But throughout my life, I think I've been put in situations where I had to either sink or swim, and I've become very comfortable with adversity, diversity, and with change. And in fact, I find myself most comfortable when... I am in a situation where there is a lot of change. And I think a lot of that stems from probably the earliest part of it was when my parents separated and divorced when I was 10 years old. And I moved across from Wisconsin to Minneapolis and ended up living in my aunt's basement for a few months. It taught me that really nothing is permanent. And that with a little perseverance and some elbow grease, you can really get quite a bit done. I think being more of a creative person that dovetails a lot on technology, a couple of the stories I like to tell is one in particular, I had an art teacher in high school who was really... It was really one of my favorite teachers. He happened to be the father of one of my best friends actually as well. But I think he saw something in me from an early age when I started taking his basic art courses that I had an ability to potentially go farther than the lessons he was teaching. And while he would give students a piece of paper and a still life and a pencil, and their job was just drawing pencil and paper, he would throw different materials on my desk constantly. For a still life, it was burlap and a paintbrush instead of paper and pencil, or it was...

3:02 And he was constantly, constantly challenging me and never really letting me get away with the status quo. In one particular instance, we were molding these clay heads. I remember very distinctly being very focused on getting all the little details and the portions and the nostrils and the eyes and really trying to make the most perfect clay head I could possibly make. And these were one-to-one clay lumps, right? They're pretty big. And he came over, he saw what I was doing. And I was so angry when he did this, but much to his credit, he came over and started pushing and pulling. And he grabbed a crosshatch knife and started making all these lines in the side of the head and making the nose crooked. And then he goes, yeah, that's a lot better. And then sort of walked off. And I was just like, how dare this a-hole do this to this thing I've been working so hard on for two days straight. And I have a very high threshold for pain, but when that fuse goes, man, it goes. And so I grabbed that thing around the neck and I squeezed it. I was taking out all my anger and frustration. And then I calmed down and I slowly pulled my neck. And I was like, I'm going to do this. And I'm like, I can't do this. I can't. I can do this. And I was taking on all my anger, frustration, and then I calms down and I slowly pulled my fingers out because if anybody's worked with clay, you know that it really sucks you in, right? So I had to sort of slowly pull my fingers out of this thing to not completely ruin what had happened. And from that, I got completely inspired and ended up making like this fish head dude with a giant mohawk and scales and a bridged nose and this big forked tongue. And because these marks in the neck that I had created reminded me of fish men from late 70s horror movies. And so that moment in time had...

4:31 I think has formed my thinking about everything that I do going forward. Nothing that is presented to me is good enough. The status quo will never be enough. And I'm always thinking, oh, well, that's awesome. But what else can we do? Where else can we go? How can we change this? How can we apply this to different things? And so there have been a myriad of things in my life like that. But those two particular instances, I think were probably the most important in terms of forming the thought process that I try to employ across everything I do today. Now, let's take that thought process. Now, can we go back and you go over career up to this point, because our listeners at home right now are probably thinking, okay, fish head, mohawk, who is this guy? You know, let's hear a story. Sure. So in high school, I actually had a complete hero worship of Glenn Plake, you know, a late 80s, early 90s, extreme skier who had a giant mohawk. And so I actually have some pictures of myself. My normal hairdo in the 90s or late 80s was, you know. Pluck a seagull's mullet, basically. Which I can provide pictures for later if you want. But occasionally, I would spike that up with Knox gelatin into a mohawk and go around in my Oakley sunglasses and pretend like I was Glenn Plake. But, you know, but that was kind of my artistic side. I think I embody two particular people, my father and my mother, obviously. My father being artistic and outgoing and sort of a bohemian person who lives a certain life and travels around the country. And that's what he enjoys. And my mom, who is a little more business oriented and likes to be close to home. And my two grandfathers, both of whom own their own business. And so, you know. So, I think, you know what I'm saying? I think I fight between those two a lot. And so, in terms of my career, I'm always fighting between my creative side who just wants to go out and be a bohemian and paint some stuff or sculpt some things on the computer or do a 3D animation or all the things I did as an artist for a decade and a half. And my business side who wants to explore technology and run spreadsheets and find creative applications of technologies and all these sorts of strange side adventures that I tend to

6:31 find myself going on. So, in terms of my path, I actually started college in 1990 in a small school in Southern Minnesota called Mankato State University. And I went there because they had an awesome business aviation program. So, I actually thought I was going to be a commercial airline pilot. In fact, some of my friends who I went to school with did end up finally realizing that dream and followed that path. But it just been working out for me. And about two and a half years into it, I dropped it and went into open studies. And I dropped it because I had discovered technology education. There was a professor named Bill Burr, who was a professor at the University of Michigan, Bill Brown, who is not with us anymore, who had a Macintosh 2CI. And this is one of the first Macintoshes that I saw with an awesome like thousand depth color monitor. And he had crazy software on there like Photoshop and all this Illustrator, Infinity, Macromedia Director, all sorts of companies and programs that I'm sure nobody really remembers anymore. But he saw my passion for these applications and essentially gave me the keys to his office and said, listen, if you want to sit here all day and all night long, but while you're doing it, why don't you take independent studies on every one of these applications and write lesson plans for me because I'm going to be offering classes for the summer. Yeah, I mean, nobody's making me do this. That sounds like a fantastic idea. I mean, I need the credits to graduate anyway. I was kind of on the seven-year plan at that point after dropping aviation. And he was giving me full three credit independent studies per application. I mean this was a dream come true. So I spent a good year basically in his office learning these things, writing the lesson plans. And then when he offered the summer session classes, I was essentially his PA.

8:01 I ended up more or less teaching these classes because he's as great a guy as he was. He really never had time to read the lesson plans or learn the applications himself. And at this point, it was basically me teaching professors in the different departments at school about these applications. My graphic arts professor, I was still taking his classes and we were still hand lettering fonts and typefaces with markers. And I'm like, here's Illustrator. And you can see the color drain out of his face. And it was like, oh no, it was my whole life. It's just been replaced by a piece of software, which is not the case really. You still need the basic art fundamentals in order to actually be an artist with a computer. The computer is just another paintbrush. So that was sort of the beginning of getting him at all. And through that process, I created a demo reel. I ended up leaving Mankato a little early. And I went to another school in Minneapolis called the School of Communication Arts, where I took an associate program to learn soft homage and 3D studio, no Macs yet on PCs. And through that process, I ended up graduating both at the same time. Because again, Bill Brown came to my rescue and said, well, listen, if you want to leave Mankato and go to the associate program, I'll give you full credit for the associate program down here at Mankato. And that actually pushed me over the limit to graduate. So he was really sort of a guardian angel and an individual who saw that this was a path that could actually lead somewhere. So I got pretty lucky, which is really, I think, an underlying theme of my entire career, a good amount of luck, some hard work and perseverance, and just making decisions at the right time. So that was kind of the start. And then after that, I made a demo reel. And that demo reel went everywhere. In fact, I kept a flip up book of all the rejection letters I got from all the different studios, Westwood Studios, Pixar, Lucasfilm, you name it, I got rejected from the best of them. And over that six months, I made another demo reel and sent it out again, it got rejected again. And eventually what happened, and I've learned this through people who are very good friends of mine now, a studio in San Diego in 1996, called Presto Studios, they were one of the first CD-ROM adventure game companies. They shipped on Apple's initial CD-Rom demo reel, and they sent it out to that shipped with the first Apple CD-ROM drives, buried in time. The Journeyman Project, actually,

10:07 it was just the Journeyman Project at that time, then after that was buried in time, etc. But they saw my first reel, sent it back half rewinded, or half watched, I should say. The second reel, they called me, had me come out to San Diego, gave me an interview, and then gave me a job. And that was really the beginning of it all. Working for an amazing game company in San Diego from 96 to 99, an amazing group of individuals who have all gone off and done even more amazing things since then. They sort of taught me what it was like to be in production, showed me the ropes, trusted me to learn new software, and gave me a huge opportunity. And I can't be more thankful to that group of individuals than I am today. Dan, this is great. A great lesson to learn, many rejections, and then the success. We have heard it many, many times and over and over again. We all live in a world where Hollywood, and I come from Bollywood, growing up is very fascinating. How did that transition happen? So when I finished up my last game at Presto Studios, we had a little bit of time off. And I had experienced some downtime between projects before, but this time I got a call from some friends up at Lucasfilm. It just so happened that my boss, who had left Presto Studios about a year earlier, went to go up and work at the Rebel Mac unit in Ireland. The Rebel Mac unit, for those who don't know, was a unit set up by John Knoll for Star Wars Episode I that was set out to prove that desktop computers, i.e. Macintoshes and off-the-shelf software like Electric Image, could actually play a role in a high-end visual effects film like Star Wars Episode I. And so when he went up, I became very interested in that path and tried to maintain contact with him.

11:39 And I went up to visit once and he had these two roommates, Kevin Bailey and Ryan Tudhope, who I found out later had been hired directly out of high school by one of my old mentors and bosses, David Dzoretz, to work as pre-visualization artists on Star Wars Episode One. I didn't know any of this at all. But because Shadi, my former boss, was working at ILM, I kept sending him updates on my work. Yeah. But he didn't have email access. ILM at the time restricted email access for security reasons. And so I sent it to Kevin and Ryan as well because I had met them on my visit and they had actually responded to my emails. So I knew they were getting them. So blindly, one day I got an offer to come up and work with them. And I said, well, listen, this sounds amazing, but I don't really want to leave Presto. Why don't I come up? I'll take a leave of absence from Presto and I'll come up and I'll do this work. And so that probably worked. But by the time that it all wrapped up, and this was on my first visual effects project. The Wake Angel sequence and the Ice Crystal sequence from a movie, Time AE. And I was like, you know what, this is really more where my heart is that I need to go pursue this. So I decided to stick with those guys. My next project, which was Moulin Rouge, which David DeStore sent me out to Australia to do. And it was supposed to be a two-week project. Quick hop over to Australia and back. And through that process, I learned what previs was all about. So we worked on Macintosh laptops and electric image and we worked with Baz Luhrmann and Chris Godfrey, the visual effects supervisor, to help Fox understand what Baz's vision was for that film. He wanted to do these giant shots where the camera moved seamlessly between the interior of the Moulin, the exterior courtyard past the elephant, through the windmill and onto Christian's apartment and a bunch of other ideas. And these were all individual sets. Interior was on stage one, the exterior courtyard was on stage two, and the windmill in Christian's apartment were on stage four or something like that. And Fox, at the time, didn't have confidence that this could be done. So we were called in. We were called in and we were asked to do a little bit of research.

13:32 We were called in to essentially build those locations, stitch them together digitally, and then prove that these big ideas could be accomplished. And we did just that. Through the course of two months, we built out a bunch of different concepts and ideas like this. Baz Luhrmann was able to take them to the studio and essentially sell the concepts. The studio said, oh, I get it. And that was the birth of my experience with previs. Now, fortunately, Kevin and Ryan and Yi-Sung Lee, the gentleman I was working with in Australia and David DeZoritz, happened to be the team from Skywalker Ranch that had done previs for Star Wars episodes. So they were like, hey, Dan seems to be doing pretty well here. Why don't we invite him over to the ranch and we'll put him on Star Wars? And that was the beginning of the big journey. Beautiful. And when I met you for the first time in your Santa Monica office, I never knew what previs means. And I'm sure most of us do not. Would you mind telling us a little bit more about what exactly previs means? Sure. Previsualization is essentially a digital animated process by which we use professional off-the-shelf visual effects software to create a visual effect. Wow. So we create a quick and dirty and iterative version of a filmmaker's vision before they go shoot it. Now, it doesn't always happen before they go shoot it, sometimes it happens well before they even have the funding to do it. So that's what we call pitch visualization.

14:47 We'll work with a filmmaker to actually come up with a concept piece that is their vision for what the film could eventually be. And they can use that to actually sell the concept and raise money or gain, you know, gain favor with a studio who's interested in doing the project. So then there's also onset visualization, which is a very, very complex process. And it's a very complex process, but it's a really, really complex process. It's a very, really, really, very complex process. And it's a very, very complex process, but it's a really, really, really, really complex process. So there's onset visualization, which is coupled now with virtual production, where we'll actually go on set and continue the iterative process of digital storytelling while a filmmaker is actually in the process of filming. And this is actually very useful because when you're on set, you know, you're burning $100,000, $200,000 a day, and it's super important to have your concepts and your ideas buttoned down and for producers to be able to know like what equipment goes where, what your schedule impacts are, etc. And sometimes shots can cost a million dollars and you want to have a plan going into that. So we are there to help facilitate those sorts of things. And then we also do a lot of post-visualization as well, which we did a ton of on Star Wars, which was to take the plates that have been shot on set, the actors, and knock out the green screen, put in the digital characters, hand it over to editorial, so editorial actually has something to cut with. I'm sure people will recognize in today's blockbuster environment, a lot of characters and environments are just simply not there when they shoot them. Hulk is not there. They have Mark Ruffalo in a giant costume, you know, with markers all over his face, and that needs to be replaced. And so what happens is, when editorial staff come in, they're like, you know what, you know what, you know what, we're going to cut that. And so what happens is, when editorial goes to cut that, it's very hard to understand the flow and context of the scene when the digital characters just simply aren't there.

16:06 And so we will go in and put those in, in a very quick, rudimentary fashion so that editorial can actually cut and make decisions that can save them thousands or not, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, once it goes into the visual effects pipeline. I keep hearing that you did something unusual, which means you're pushing the envelope all the time. How's this experience has been? There's been an overarching realization. There's been a realization from the studio side that the digital assets that they pay visual effects vendors to build for their films are just as valuable as the films themselves, if not more in cases, because it can help save them money for sequels and other content like location-based entertainment, VR experiences, video games, etc. So there has been classically a tendency for studios like ours, like visual effects studios or even game companies, to deliver assets that are built for one particular purpose, for completing the visual effects or for doing visualization or for building video games. And we took an overall thought process around digital asset creation and simply said, well, listen, is there a way that we can build these assets through one process, one pipeline, and still use them for all the different use cases that come up? And this was about a nine-month effort that we built a small team around and essentially proved that, yes, there are actually ways that you can build assets that, with the proper upfront planning, can tap out the different specific assets that each trade or craft, or use case, might require.

17:31 So I think that's going to be a very relevant conversation moving forward, especially as we start talking about virtual production, where we're moving a lot of the decision-making and the workflows back to the front of the process, where the key decision-makers, like the DPs and the directors and producers, are on set to make decisions on the day about. Where we're building giant LED walls and putting real-time graphics on those LED walls that represent the final picture, so you can actually get your shots completely in-camera now without having to do anything. You don't have to go through a visual effects process. These assets need to be built in order to accommodate not only these real-time solutions that end up on these real- time LED walls, but also be able to trickle down to visual effects so that they can do any last-minute polish or even complete large sequences that also require the same assets off to location-based entertainment, off to video games, and all the different places where digital assets have become a commodity now. Sounds like technology has taken front seat into the movies. What are the new things you have seen in the last few years, which is making an important part of the decision for the movie-making? Sure. So, the big thing that we are working on, and this dovetails specifically with real-time technology, is something called virtual production.

18:46 Now, this is something that myself and my company Halon are working tirelessly on and are engaging with vendors and are engaging with film studios and vendors and storytellers with on a daily basis now. Yeah. So, virtual production is kind of a catch-all. It's a big phrase. It means, you know, it's been tried to be defined, but in the end, it's really a collection of digital tools and processes that come together to help filmmakers tell stories. It includes game engines, it includes LED walls, it includes performance capture, which is motion capture, plus face capture. Includes all sorts of, it includes all of these tools brought together into a cohesive fashion for a specific purpose. Not all films, not all creative, not all stories. They're all the different parts of virtual production. You can break pieces off and use it ad hoc. But as an ecosystem, it is a really amazing, exciting time right now. And frankly, we see it as how Hollywood is going to get moving again during this whole COVID pandemic. Halon has always implemented untried new technology. Kind of what are the decision process in implementing this new technology? What are the discussions like? And pre-biz, this isn't just Halon. This is really pre-bizz as well. Halon tends to be at the cutting edge of this as well, because I have a very high threshold for pain and I tend to take on projects that are always doing things that are a little out there on the edge and crazy.

20:07 But pre-biz, as part of its DNA, has always been ahead on technology. Like in 2009, 2000, pre-bizz exists because of the democratization of consumer off-the-shelf hardware and software. It just would not exist without that. And we took that idea and that philosophy and we pushed it into everything we did. So anytime a piece of technology became commoditized, became a commodity, it became something that's really important. It became consumer level, became available to any kid in his bedroom across the world. We were like, that's for us. And this technology has been percolating for a long time, especially game engine technology. The biggest obstacle for us on game engine technology was cost. When Valve came out with Half-Life 2, the first trailer, I happened to find myself on a private jet with George Lucas and I was like, this is my opportunity. I could show George real-time technology and try to convince him to use this to make movies. And I showed him the trailer. And he was like, you know what? He was pretty receptive. He was like, wow, you know, this is amazing, but you know, I'm going to be gone before this stuff is really ready to be used for prime time and you kids, you're going to get all the fun, right? And I was like, okay, okay, wrong message, but he gets it, right? So then the same thing happened during Gears of War. So the same thing happens again with Gears of war. When Epic Games came out with the Gears of the War franchise, they released a trailer and then they actually showed the trailer running real-time in their engine.

21:25 And it showed like all the dirty behind the scenes stuff. The character jumping all over the place and the camera moving and props changing and the lighting changing per shot. And this was like a huge watershed moment. And this was in a tool that they had developed called MET. And I, at the time was on contract with Steven Spielberg for visualization and I got a chance to go in and present this to him and I had a couple of the Epic guys along with me, which is actually why I have such a great relationship with them and started a long time back. And Steven saw this and was fascinated and he understood it as well. But again, the technology wasn't quite there and the license for use of the engine was a million dollars. And there were all these sort of things that we just couldn't get past. And so when Tim Sweeney came out about five years ago and released a YouTube video that said, listen, if you love something, set it free, that was the moment. That was the moment Epic Games gave Unreal Engine away for free and put all their source code on GitHub. And it may have been on GitHub prior to that, but the licensing structure for linear entertainment and media like ours, the license was free. That was our moment. And I think about a week after that, I convened the entire senior structure of our company in our motion capture volume. And I said, guys. This is what's happening. The engine is free. We are going to use it. I don't care how hard it is. I don't what we have to write to make it work for us. I don't that it's going to be slower and that we're going to have to train new people. This is the future. This is what we have do.

22:41 And of course, like you always get, there are some people that are excited, there are some people that grumble a little bit because there are practical implications to the business side of things on these kinds of decisions. But we got really lucky. We found, at the time, a visual effects producer and Ryan Stafford. And he actually saw that. He saw the potential. He saw the opportunity and he gave us a soft cushion to be able to go in and use this technology on War for Planet of the Apes. And they knew it was going to take training. They knew it was gonna be slower. They knew there were going to be hurdles and obstacles and there are going to be warts and problems. But they were willing to take the chance to do it. And through the crucible of that experience, the team that we put on it, led by AJ Brion and Casey, one of our supervisors. They figured it out. They made it work. And that, for us, cascaded into essentially what we consider to be the core component of our pipeline now. Unreal Engine sits at the core of everything we do as a company. And that, in and of itself, has created a situation where we have been able to diversify and grow our business almost 100% in those years. I want to ask you a lot of questions about implementing technology, Ward, and those conversations and the barriers that also implement technology.

23:56 But you just mentioned George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, as if it was nothing. I got to hear at least one or two stories of something Hollywood, just for our listeners. Well, that's actually the amazing part about those two individuals. George Lucas, he did all of his production up at Skywalker Ranch, which is a beautiful functioning ranch with cows and horses and grapevines and olive trees and amazing production facilities. I speak about George in a casual sense because that's the environment he created. I remember getting yelled at by our producer, Rick McCallum, once because I was treating George with kick gloves and I needed to schedule everything around with the proper channels and all that kind of stuff. And Rick was like, honey, you have a relationship with George. If you need to talk to George, just go talk to George. You don't need to bother everybody with all these questions, right? And so that was the environment. When you needed George for something, obviously, he was a busy person and he had a schedule and whatnot. But if he was an editorial, you went down, you knocked on the door, said, hey, George, I have a question about this or that. And then he would answer it for you. And that was that. And at the end of the day, everybody's just people. We're all just people. We're just trying to survive. And that cannot be more true than for people like George and Steven as well. We all are human and we're all fallible, but at the end the day, we want to be loved.

25:15 We want to be respected and we want to work with people to create awesome stuff. And so that was pretty much my experience working with George and I can't thank George enough for everything he done for us as a community. But he also introduced me to Steven, I remember specifically. But what really happened to facilitate an ongoing relationship with her was summer that we did Star Wars Episode Three, Steven was slated to start filming Munich, I believe, and it got pushed. So he was on the phone with George telling him he was going to be bored all summer sitting at home with nothing to do. And George was in Australia shooting Star Wars Episode three and had many outstanding sequences that needed to be visualized. And so George sent me out to Steven's house. I was on a laptop with some special software that ILM had designed that was sort of a nonlinear editor that they had custom built for Maya at the time. And I spent several weeks either at Steven's office in Los Angeles or at Steven's guest house in Hamptons, essentially sitting one on one with him, banging out sequences for Star Wars Episode Three. He would sketch things on napkins. We had a little key code, you know, like a circle with some lines through it was Obi-Wan for the beard, a circle with, you know with X's or whatever was this other character, you know, we had a whole thing. And so I would basically bang out a shot on the laptop. He would sketch another one, work on that for a little bit. He'd sketch another one. We just kept going back and forth like this.

26:31 We did five, I think, sequences for Star Wars Episode Three like this. We did the Yoda Palpatine fight in the Senate. We did the Mustafar battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin. We did Order 66. We did the lizard chase in Utapau. At least one other one, forgetting right now. But you know, once I was done blocking it out, Steven would look over my shoulder and say, yeah, that's it. Or no, let's change this around a little bit and we would just kind of continue. And then we'd play the whole sequence together in Maya. And that was a huge, you know. You know, craziness because Maya wasn't set up to handle compartmentalized time in a near real time linear workflow. So I'd change one shot and it would break the other one. So Steven would be like, oh, no, did we just destroy it all? And I'd be like, no, no, just wait, wait, I'll fix it. Right. So I'd go and I'd tweak it. I'd go home and I'd spend all night in my hotel room afterwards, fixing it and bring it back the next day and say, see you, I saved it, you know, and then they can be like, Oh, good. Okay, it's all there. But it was a fantastic experience. And through that experience, when Steven got called by Paramount to do War of the Worlds Summer 05. And he called George and said, Hey, listen, I know you guys are wrapping up Star Wars, I could really use Previz to help me get War of the Worlds in theaters because War of the Worlds was a unique beast. Paramount somehow had something move and discovered they didn't have a summer tentpole for 2006. And they had nine months to do a visual effects tentpole film from dead stop to in theaters.

27:47 These films take two years minimum, typically, even today. And so Steven realized that through the Previz process with my help. And the help of the team members that were at the ranch that were wrapping at the ranch, he could actually completely direct the film before he stepped on set, control his vision, define specifically for ILM what needed to be done. And the process worked seamlessly. He moved his desk into our office to do the Previz for a full month, along with his copious other duties as a film director. When we went on set, I traveled with them the whole time continuing the process working with Dennis Mirren and Adam Sumner, the first AD and Steven and Kathy Kennedy, the producer, the producers on the film to make sure that everything was buttoned up and it was exactly what he wanted. So that as he shot, it's what he shot. As he handed things off to ILM, ILM knew exactly what they had to do. I don't even know if it's been done since, frankly, but ILM did the visual effects for the worlds in two or three months, which is an insane schedule for the volume of work that had to be accomplished for that film. So that was my introduction to Hollywood, which was unlike any introduction to Hollywood that I think anybody has probably experienced for quite some time. Amazing. What do you think is, post-COVID, how this movie industry is going to change and how technology is going to help pick up from where we have left off?

29:02 Sure. So COVID has been quite an awakening, I think, for us as a company, but I think for the industry as a whole as well. And I think it has ripple effects across a lot of other industries as well. And I've talked to some friends and other companies about this. We have been investigating cloud services for a long time. We work where the action is, right? We go where the action. It means going on set. We love it. We have computers with us. If we go to somebody else's office, we lift up and push a whole infrastructure over there. Security, servers, NASAs, all the whole thing. So we've been looking at cloud infrastructure, work from home, hiring people abroad, all this kind of stuff. But it's really never made much sense. Well, we pulled it off in two days. When we realized that it needed to happen, like COVID was a thing and we had our thumb on it, we were like, okay, this has to happen, right? And I think a lot of people are finding that the old thoughts, the old methodologies, the creaky approach to progress. Yeah. That we all tend to take because we don't want to upset the course of things or we don't want to put ourselves in too big a risk basket, basically. All that's out the window now. With the horribleness that is the pandemic, there is a tremendous opportunity for change. The mental flexibility is there for people to accept that is going to be the case. They're malleable now. They're much more malleable than they have been in the past. And I think we're going to see tremendous amounts of progress in terms of technology, processes.

30:20 We're going to start seeing growth. We're going to start seeing virtual production, I believe, is going to be one of the things that allows us to get production just moving in, just flat out. Usually you would send 10, 20 people to a location to do a location scout. That's not going to happen anymore. You're going to send one or two people to scan that location digitally, put it in a game engine like Unreal. You're going put it in an LED wall cave so that people can explore it, or you're going to put on a VR headset now and work collaboratively from home. All of these things are, while they've kind of been on the periphery and amazing people like Jon Favreau. And Mega Opus and other companies have been doing this kind of stuff for Lion King and the Jungle Book and other projects and the Mandalorian. I think people saw them as sort of a fringe, sort of an expensive fringe experiment that was necessary for those specific projects, but it didn't really apply to me. And now everybody's looking around going, holy cow, I got nothing to do. How can we make this apply to me? So that is something that I'm really heavily focused on at several different tracks, consulting to direct execution. And it's something Halon, my company, my visualization company is focused on. And it's something that I've been working on for a long time, and it's something I've been working on since I was a kid. So I've been trying to figure out what the best way across Hollywood is. How do we employ real-time rendering, LED walls, virtual reality, augmented reality, even, to get Hollywood up and running again? That is a huge thing that has to happen. In short, if the listeners wants to know what exactly Halon does, what you do, would you mind just sharing more?

31:39 Sure. Well, I actually, since I founded the company about 18 years ago, I was a visualization supervisor for about 15 of those years, then decided that I really wanted to try and branch out and do other things. So I've tried. I've been directing. I've been directing game trailers. My latest one was the E3 trailer for Borderlands 3. I also direct motion capture shoots and performance capture shoots. So actors on set wearing funny suits and balls on them and head cameras and stuff. I also do a lot of technological pursuits like the transmedia asset pipeline experiments, chase cloud solutions. Just recently completed, actually it was a 60 square mile photogrammetry shoot in a large national monument. So I'm always taking on sort of these crazy fringe projects. So I'm a little bit different than what Halon is specifically, but I try to guide and push Halon forward in that regard. So Halon in and of itself is a visualization company primarily. We utilize real-time technology to tell stories. Now we do that across video games, cinematics and trailers. We do that for feature films. We do that TV shows. We do that location-based entertainment. We do a little bit of virtual reality work as well and some augmented reality work. And we do that for both entertainment and Department of Defense. And anything that we can really get our hands on from a real-time engine perspective, if it relates to telling a story. That is pretty much our bread and butter, and that's what digital visualization really is.

32:56 And Dan, if anyone wants to find out more information about yourself, your company, what's the best way to go about doing it? The best way to find information about us is probably to go up to halon.com. From there, you can bounce off to our Vimeo portal and various news sites and our Twitter feed as well. I think we're Team Halon on Twitter. I can send you that information after. At HalonPreviz. That's our Twitter handle. Beautiful. Thanks so much, Dan. Thank you for listening to Silicon Valley Tech Behind the Scenes. To find out more, contact the team, or to be a guest on the show, visit our website at siliconvalleytechpodcasts.com. We look forward to hearing from you, and remember to support the show by leaving a review to encourage us to keep creating great content like this.