INSIDE • James Cameron: Blockbuster Businessman • Brad Feld: Turning Computers Into More Useful Tools • Terry Wohlers: Manufacturing The Future Of 3D Printing • Word On The Street • Emerging Tech Portfolio Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Volume 10/ Number 11 / November 2011 www.forbesnanotech.com REPORT James Cameron: Blockbuster Businessman The Insider JOSH WOLFE, EDITOR ames Cameron is an award- winning director, producer, s we go into the holi- Jscreenwriter, environmental- A day season, we bring ist and entrepreneur. Over the you a very special gift. On last 20 years, he has written and top of revealing one of the directed some of the largest hottest new emerging tech- blockbuster movies of all time, nology areas, we sit for a including The Terminator, Aliens, rare and exclusive interview The Abyss, Titanic and most re - with a very special friend cently, Avatar . His films have and guest. He is a lifelong pushed the limits of special ef - learner, technology tinkerer, fects, and his fascination with visual visionary and a six- technical developments led him time Academy Award nomi- to co-create the 3-D Fusion nee responsible for the two Camera System. He has also con- highest-grossing films of all tributed to new techniques in time (nearly $2B for Titanic underwater filming and remote and $3B for Avatar ): James vehicle technology. Cameron’s JAMES CAMERON Cameron. Inspired in part first job was as a truck driver and by his father (an electrical he wrote only in his spare time. After seeing Star Wars, he quit that job and wrote his first science fiction engineer) and originally script for a ten-minute short calledXenogenesis . Soon after, he began working with special effects, and by studying physics in college, 1984 he had written and directed the movie that would change his life— The Terminator. Cameron was he became a miniature- the founder and CEO of Digital Domain, a visual effects production and technology company, and is a Continued on page 2 co-founder and co-chairman of Cameron | Pace Group, an industry leader in 3D technologies and pro- Continued on page 2 Brad Feld: Turning Terry Wohlers: Computers Into More Manufacturing The Useful Tools Future Of 3D Printing rad Feld has been an early stage investor erry Wohlers is principal consultant Band entrepreneur for more than twenty Tand president of Wohlers Associates, years. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, an independent consulting firm he he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, founded 25 years ago. Through this com - prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures, a pany, Wohlers has provided consulting as- company that helped launch and operate sistance to more than 170 organizations in software companies. He is also a co-founder 23 countries. He has authored nearly 400 BRAD FELD TERRY WOHLERS Continued on page 4 Continued on page 6 James Cameron: Blockbuster Businessman Continued from page 1 duction services. He has received three Academy Awards, two hon- What were the challenges in using that early equipment for the orary doctorates and sits on the NASA Advisory Council. type of films you wanted to make? The equipment was very standardized—you got some film, or if it was How did you get started in the movie business? a low budget film, you shot on short ends. We were pushing the enve- I was working as a truck driver, and on Saturdays I would drive 70 lope in the area of motion control, which was an expensive and exotic miles to the USC campus, and spend the entire day in the library look- process at the time. We achieved some high-end effects with low-cost ing at books, periodicals and dissertations so that I could learn about workarounds, as we couldn’t afford all the right equipment. Almost visual effects. It was all pretty technical stuff, everything from optical everything I used to work with is obsolete today, yet one of the printing, to film sensitometry, to optics. I’d collate photocopies into strangest things about filmmaking is that in some ways, nothing has binders and ended up creating my own technical library of state-of-the- changed for me, because it’s still storytelling. You’ve got to understand art cinema visual effects. In effect, I gave myself a post-grad education. what the audience wants to see, you still have to create great characters When I finally got a job doing visual effects, I was the most knowl- and stories, you still have to imagine it, and go through the steps of de- edgeable guy in the whole facility, but my knowledge was entirely the- sign and execution. But none of the techniques, none of the cameras oretical. I had to learn many harsh realities of actual production. The- and none of the processes that we used when I started out in the early ory and practice were colliding, and it was a very interesting time. ‘80s are used today. Not one thing. What sort of equipment were you using when you first started When was the first time you saw a digital effect that you shooting? thought was truly magical or amazing? When I started working professionally, we used what I call “meat I remember the exact moment. It was in 1988, when we started The grinder cameras,” where the film ran through moving sprockets. I Abyss. I had written a sequence that I didn’t know how to execute, started cutting on an upright Moviola editing machine, and then I where water raises itself off the ground and makes faces. I could visu- graduated to a flatbed. I learned how to load all the different kinds of alize it perfectly with surrealist clarity, but no one knew how to do it. cameras, and I could load an Arri IIC magazine in the dark in record We considered claymation and other advanced methods using high- time! That’s a lost art. I don’t know how many people in the world speed photography of water projected onto white clay. That probably today still know how to load that kind of camera. would have worked—although it would have looked different. I was skeptical of computer animation, but looked at some test The Insider Continued from page 1 shots. It was all very crude at that point, but we decided to do two more tests with two different companies. (One of them was Industrial model maker. His work has inspired engineers, technologists Light and Magic, with CEO Dennis Muren, who I think has more Os- and entrepreneurs the world over from Aliens, Terminator, Ter- cars than Meryl Streep. Dennis was visionary enough to see that this is minator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss and True Lies. where things were heading.) Interestingly enough, neither test was Earlier this year, I joined Jim and the cast from Avatar for particularly good, but effective enough to know that the whole thing the opening of the high-tech immersive Avatar exhibit at Paul was possible. We had 16 shots, and a year to complete it, and we barely Allen’s Experience Music Project in Seattle. Jim shares some of got it done. When people saw the sequence, they couldn’t process how his secrets for filmmaking, breakthrough digital effects and the something so utterly impossible could be so photorealistic. It was a way technology (specifically technology he has patented) is huge moment, both for us and for the effects industry at large. revolutionizing the way we experience immersive movies and bringing the ideas and imagination of science fiction to life. What made you decide to start your own visual effects And speaking earlier of miniature-models, there is an ava- company? lanche of activity in three-dimensional printing, personal fabri- I was friends with Stan Winston and he was working on Jurassic Park. cation and human-computer interaction. We bring you two ex- I saw some of the test shots and I realized that this digital curve was clusive viewpoints on the field from an investor—VC Brad going vertical. We both believed that the future was in computer gen- Feld, behind a new investment in the space and also an early eration, not in the effects we had been previously doing, including investor in the technology behind Guitar Hero—and industry prosthetics and animatronics. Stan already had a few animation work- guru Terry Wohlers, who many look to for the past, present stations going, and I said “why have four workstations when you can and future of 3D printing and the new revolution in personal- have 400? Let’s go get some money and do a company.” I never ized manufacturing. thought I had a particularly good head for business, until founding As always, here’s to thinking big about thinking small and to Digital Domain. the emerging inventors and investors who seek to profit from the unexpected and the unseen… How did the business get started? We started in 1992 by raising $15 million from IBM [IBM], and they came in for 50% of the company. I think they wanted some synergy with the film industry so they could understand it better, especially as Hollywood began embracing technology. The team included Stan and myself, and Scott Ross as a third partner. Scott had been running In- dustrial Light & Magic, so he had big organizational skills. I remember 2 | NOVEMBER 2011 © COPYRI GHT 2011 F ORBES/WOLF E EMERGI NG T ECH REPORT James Cameron: Blockbuster Businessman Continued from page 2 one funny conversation about who would run the optical department. I told him there wouldn’t be an optical department—it would all be “I wanted to create great digital.