Member Profile: Michael Wahrman
1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
Its very nice of you to ask. Whatever it is I do now is different from what I did then. The world was a different place and it is hard to explain. No one thought that computer animation would be useful for much. There were some of us who felt compelled to show that it was useful in various diverse ways. Some of these true believers had to sneak around and publish ideas and hope their management never found out. Some of us postponed graduate school or took a cut in pay or otherwise did career damaging things that seem irresponsible in retrospect.
So I did some of those things. I wrote an animation system (primarily a renderer) for a leading production company. That software, to everyone’s surprise, turned out to be the prototype for a system that got used by 500 studios worldwide and won me an Science and Technology award from the Motion Picture Academy. Then I helped friends produce a short animated film that featured behavioral animation as a way of supporting my friend Craig Reynolds who was publishing on that topic that year. After that, being unemployed, I got into business with my friend Brad deGraf, starting out in his garage, and that was pretty crazy. We ended up hiring everyone we knew and helped produce a real time character for SIGGRAPH with one of the earliest SGI workstations and then did a bunch of other productions for theme parks and feature films back before CG was used for that.
The point is that whatever my role may have been in those underfinanced exercises in idealism, they didn’t pay well nor did they lead to normal employment. It was fun but not very practical. Now, everyone does this stuff and for many years I have been looking for things to do that might be valued in society, like money laundering or destabilizing governments. While I wait to win the lottery, I try to keep busy by making pictures with computers and teaching a class now and then.
2. What was your first job?
My first real job was with the RAND Corporation. They put me on one of those well-meaning social research projects from the 1970s. They paid my way back to school and let me work with some amazing people and gave me access to their facilities.
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
I have degrees from UCLA.
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
Suzy Landa of RAND hosted the Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH in a conference room there. This was perhaps 1976 or 1977. That is where I met Larry Cuba, John Whitney Jr, Gary Demos, Richard Hollander, Art Durinsky, Craig Reynolds, Doug Kay, George Joblove, Bill Kovacs, Jim Blinn, Pat Cole and others. My management at RAND insisted that I attend at least one academic conference per year and so I suggested the national SIGGRAPH Conference.
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
Most of the national conferences took place for me in a haze of sleep deprivation and fear. A few notable moments include
At the conference in 1980 I went to hear a talk by someone named Dr. Ed Catmull on the topic of what he had learned running a CG lab at the New York Institute of Technology. I went up to introduce myself afterwards and he spent about an hour talking to me about what he wanted to do next which was to make feature length, narrative-driven, animated films with computers. At the time, very few people thought that would be possible. Ed and friends went on to found PIXAR.
The technical reception was small enough that you could meet people. Three of the young people there in what might have been 1981 carried a notebook with test pictures. They had just graduated from college. They were Carl Rosendahl, Richard Chuang, and Glenn Entis, the founders of Pacific Data Images.
I sat next to Larry Cuba when his film “Calculated Movements” premiered at the Electronic Theatre.
Trey Stokes, Brad deGraf and I performed the synthetic opera in real time at the Electronic Theatre of 1988.
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
Just want to say hi and thank anyone who helped out who I might have forgotten to thank at the time.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
I wonder what restaurant and who is picking up the check? Will someone provide a translator to come to dinner with us in the case that our guest does not speak modern English? A few names come to mind as potential candidates. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Eric Blair, Evelyn Waugh, Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georges Danton, Maimonides, Hugues de Payens, Malcolm X, the Marquis de Lafayette, Karl Marx, Oleg son of Rurik, Crazy Horse of the Lakota, Richard Henry Lee of the Virginia Continental Congress, Charles Darwin, Dr. John von Neumann, Kandinsky, Man Ray and others. Maybe we should have a dinner party?
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
I don’t think I should talk about that.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
The great American author Louis L’Amour, in an airline magazine, once said that you should never tell your age. There is too much ageism in America.
Willis Ware of the RAND Corporation showed me a 16 mm film shot off the screen by someone named Ivan Sutherland. It was part of his thesis project, I think, about something called Sketchpad.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
My parole officer
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
Pride is a sin