5. What Is The IT Department At Lucas Like?

The IT department at Lucasfilm isn't like the one at your average insurance company or bank, to be sure. Plumer supervises four different departments and about 150 people in total. There is his support staff, which at least now has to support only a single consolidated USA campus and no longer has to run between several different locations. There is another department that develops tools and handles special projects for the film and game developers and does new product R&D when needed. There is your traditional information systems department that handles tracking the visual assets and production projects as well as the various databases that are the repository for this information. Finally, there is his system engineering team, a small group of guys that Plumer says he "can throw any problem at anytime."

As you might expect, the environment is pretty stressful but satisfying. Plumer said he is always looking for good people, but emphasizes that "we are a pretty intensive environment."

"ILM is known for delivering on time, and a lot of that is due to how we can scale up very quickly, and our throughput is second to no one. That puts a lot of pressure on our support team," Plumer said. "On the engineering side, with systems and computer graphics, we are always looking for people. We have many engineers with advanced PhDs in physics and imaging."

Plumer mentioned that he works with several Stanford University students as interns, who help with writing scripts in various languages such as perl and python. "We try to get people who have exposure to the bigger picture and understand the context of their work," he said. "We have a lot of perfectionists here."

Cliff Plumer shows off some of ILM's new Presidio campus.

"A lot of what we do here is magic, we are just simulating reality. We aren't creating reality. We have to get people to focus on the bigger picture. We have to pull off a representation of reality that looks good," Plumer said. "That is hard when you have got kids coming out of MIT and Stanford without much background or context for what we are doing. So much of what we do is optimizing and fine tuning systems."

As an example of what he means by simulating reality, Plumer spoke about their work on the movie The Perfect Storm:

"We worked with a physics professor from the University of Wisconsin to figure out what it would take to create a 100-foot wave and understand the water dynamics so we could show them on screen. We were able to do it and thought we had a great result, and sat down with him and immediately he went into directing the performance of the wave rather than dealing with the science.

"It turns out we weren't quite accurate in what we were showing from a physics perspective. So we told him 'Of course we can do that,' having no idea how we were going to do it and we did. We constantly walk a fine line of 'that's good enough' and build the controls so that the creative person can get the look that they want and the performance that they want."

The company is increasingly turning toward more exacting simulations. Plumer noted ILM's need for people who know fluid dynamics, skin simulations and detailed animations on a variety of surfaces and materials. And of course, more demands for more perfect simulations drive the demand for more intense computing: "What we have done is migrate to 64 bit CPUs with AMD, to get more usable RAM, more processing power. We built a simulation server a few months ago for imaging fire shots that had four CPUs with 32 GB of RAM, just for crunching simulations. We have such heavy tasks to throw at it. My call is to decide whether this is a short-term solution for one task or something we will need for the long term."