Lucas built his upgraded gaming/film effects facility the same way he makes a movie - with a sweeping vision, an obsessive eye for detail, and a geek's reliance on computers. The 3-D simulations of the new San Francisco campus rivaled any of the pre-visualizations of Coruscant produced for the final chapter of the Star Wars saga. Architects created digital depictions of the lobby, soundstage, theater, and every room or office, realistic down to the fabric on the chairs and the lumens of the lightbulbs. Ever the auteur, Lucas approved each rendering himself - reviewing four or five possible setups for every site before picking his favorite.
When the production wraps in July, some 1,500 employees will move into the 850,000-square-foot, $350 million set that is the Letterman Digital Arts Center. Located on the former Presidio army base, the campus is a coming-out, a move away from Lucas' secretive Skywalker Ranch and stealth office park in San Rafael, California, to a public park at the base of the impossibly unstealth Golden Gate Bridge. Named after the hospital that formerly occupied the site, Letterman brings together three arms of the Empire that have long been separate: Industrial Light & Magic, the effects division; LucasArts, the gaming branch; and Lucasfilm's marketing, online, and licensing units.
The joint facility will allow films and games, two principal sources of revenue for Lucas, to develop on the same track. ILM effects artists and LucasArts game designers will share a cafeteria, a fitness center, and, most important, a software platform so each company can take advantage of the others' tools. A reengineered gaming engine, for instance, can be a real-time visualization tool for directors on set, while a game developer might use a film lighting technique to add sophisticated illumination to a scene. The two divisions already share enough of the same technology that the assets of the big-screen Revenge of the Sith will be incorporated directly into a game version, rather than the film content being used as mere reference material, as was done in the past. "ILM did the effects for the movie AI," says Lucasfilm CTO Cliff Plumer. "But Microsoft created the game. Now we'll be able to offer clients both services. We'll be an integrated digital entertainment studio." Letterman, in other words, is the physical incarnation of a longtime techno-business trend: the convergence of the movie and gaming industries.
To support all that data exchange, Lucas equipped his new outpost with more than 3,000 processors running 24/7 over a 10-gigabit network that can deliver hundreds of terabytes of data - a factor-of-10 upgrade over the company's existing system. With 1-gig pipes linking every desk to the network, artists don't have to wait for tomorrow's dailies - they can email shots-in-progress to the f/x supervisor for immediate feedback, and view hi-def video without leaving their chairs. What's more, they can work independently with large data files containing all of the information about a given scene. Previously, shots had to be broken into small components and spread across several machines. "In a business like ours, where the margins are extremely low, efficiency is important," says John Knoll, an effects supervisor whose résumé includes the last three Star Wars films, Pirates of the Caribbean, and, in a previous life, a bit of software called Photoshop. "If you're going to compete with the guys running effects shops out of their garages, you've got to be lean."
Lucas' operation has become soft over the years. His special effects branch once dominated the industry, winning its first Oscar for Star Wars in 1977 and 13 more between 1980 and 1994. Though nominated consistently, ILM hasn't won the award since. Today, it's plagued by defections. Many of its stars have decamped (most recently, former ILM president Jim Morris to Pixar) for firms like this year's Oscar winner Sony Imageworks and the Orphanage, a boutique house formed by three ILMers in 1999. And then there's the competition from New Zealand and the director of "the other trilogy," Peter Jackson. The lord of the Rings saga recently invested $35 million in a new postproduction site and $7 million in a soundstage. He also owns a stake in the f/x company Weta Digital, which took home three Oscars for the Tolkien movies.
With Letterman, Lucas hopes to once again become the force for a new generation.
The gaming + effects + film studio of tomorrow
TENANT SPACE
Offices: Want to feel the Force every day? There are 170,000 square feet of space for lease.
Restaurant: Open to the public.
FILM & TENANT SPACE
Workstations: Offices for Lucasfilm corporate staff.
Coffee Shop: Open to the public.
FILM & EFFECTS
Workstations: Offices for Lucasfilm marketing, licensing, and online ventures, plus work areas for Industrial Light & Magic employees.
Theater: The 350-seat theater can screen film or digital files at 2,048-pixel resolution (4K in the future). It sits on poured slab, which isolates the projection room from vibrations.
Child Care Center / Playground
GAMING & EFFECTS
Data Center: The hub of the new Letterman Digital Arts Center, and the workhorse for LucasArts and ILM artists, this 13,500-square-foot room (roughly three basketball courts) houses thousands of servers that handle rendering, data storage, and network services like email. With capacity for 14,000 processors, the center can move 1,000 terabytes of data a day across the building's 10-gigabit fiber network.
Media Data Center: Racks of specialized servers crunch data for high-speed compositing and transfer movie and game files to the editing suites, theaters, and nine desktop viewing stations.
Training Center: Artists learn to use tools in development.
Fitness Center
Image Capture Studio: Thirty-four cameras, plus a 3-D stereo photography rig, line the 1,600-square-foot stage. A giant door accommodates large-scale models, and a 180-degree blue screen allows directors to capture image data and composite it against a digital background in real time. There are plans to double the number of cameras.
Scanning & Recording room: Located in the stable center of the building on poured slab, this room is insulated from the vibrations and noise of passing traffic.
Digital Editing Suites: Fifteen rooms can be reconfigured on the fly for editing, compositing, audio mixing, or digital color timing.
Garage: Underground lot with 1,500 spots.
Backup Power: An uninterruptible power supply and backup generators keep the data center running in case of power outage.
PUBLIC PARK
The grounds were designed by Lawrence Halprin, the landscape architect behind the FDR memorial in Washington, DC. He also restored San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square.
Contributing editor Jessie Scanlon (jessie@wiredmag.com) wrote about architect Rem Koolhaas in issue 13.03.
credit 111th Aerial Photography Squadron
A new hope: Letterman Digital Arts Center pulls together the f/x power of Industrial Light & Magic, the gaming muscle of LucasArts, and the brains of Lucasfilm.
Clockwise from lower left: tenant space, film & tenant space, film & effects, gaming & effects
Feature:
Plus:
