Richard Kerris
Chief technical officer, Lucasfilm
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"Everybody has been putting their focus on the product," Kerris says. "When you do that, you get great products but in a very vertical sense. So you can build a great product for a film, or you can build a great product for a game, but how you use these things across each other is where the real magic is, and that's all about the pipeline."
Kerris' goal at Lucasfilm, which hired him away from Apple in January, is to build a single pipeline for games, animation and movie visual effects. That could revolutionize production of all three.
Kerris aims to build a system in which everybody and everything talks, the same language, in essence. "People forget that communication is the key," he says.
Communication is a major focus for the 47-year-old Kerris. An accomplished drummer and self-described "bad guitar player," he started his career making musicvideos in the early 1980s. That led to a fascination with computer graphics, but he keeps one foot in the rock 'n' roll world -- he was technical adviser on the past two Rolling Stones tours.
"The teams I have at Lucas, we all kind of have this musician philosophy, even if we're not actually musicians," he says. "We all jam, whether it's on technology or on music. A shared vision is what makes it come together."
Take: "We innovate with technology by asking 'How can we make it seamless?' It has to be a tool the artist uses but doesn't have to depend on. We have to constantly remind ourselves, if they're thinking about the technology, we're not doing our job good enough, we have to do it better."
