I'm Jenny Ely. I work at ILMxLAB,
Lucasfilm's immersive entertainment studio in San Francisco, California.
Get in the Door is shining a spotlight on the talented teams at Lucasfilm
and Industrial Light & Magic's global studios
who bring your favorite films, games, TV shows,
and theme park attractions to life.
Today, I'm talking with a few members
of ILMxLAB's production team in San Francisco, California.
-Let's meet the crew. -My name is Kerynne Tejada.
I'm a production assistant here at xLAB.
And I've been at the company for a year and a half now.
Hi. I'm Sarah Barrick. I'm a production manager at ILMxLAB.
I've been with the company about four and a half years.
Hi. I'm John Romulo, a senior production assistant at ILMxLAB,
and I've been with the company for a year and a half now.
Hi. I'm Shereif Fattouh, senior producer at ILMxLAB,
and I've been with the company about three and a half years.
Tell us what is ILMxLAB?
So ILMxLAB is Lucasfilm's immersive entertainment studio,
and that's where we make our content
in virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality,
and the focus is really on putting the player and the users
into the worlds that they come to know and love
and create those experiences that immerse players
in a way that they haven't ever before.
What is the difference between AR, VR, and MR?
So virtual reality, you are totally in a digital space.
AR is augmented reality,
and that means you have the real world with you,
but you also have bits and pieces of the digital world placed in that as well.
And MR is mixed reality. It's gonna be a mixture of all those.
What other kinds of disciplines do production workers interact with?
Production workers get to interact with all the disciplines, actually.
And it's really amazing to be able to work with designers,
from engineers to the environment artists as well as concept artists.
So we're able to interact with almost everyone.
As Kerynne said, designers and your artists,
and you have a huge team. A huge team that you're working with.
But also, you're working alongside people that are external.
So you may have an external director.
You may have external talent or actors that you're working with as well.
Give us an example of a time
that your team worked together to get something done.
We recently had to collaborate to put a demo together
for one of our products that's currently in development.
So that brings all of production together
to make sure that we're in alignment on our milestones
and that we're tracking towards the date that we've decided for the delivery.
Then we check in with our teams and make sure that they're not blocked,
and that they feel good about the milestone that's coming up,
and that their work is also on track to deliver.
How do visual effects for an immersive experience differ from a film?
With the immersive experiences that we're building,
we're in real-time development.
And a lot of the experiences that we have, have interactive components.
We've seen the film industry moving very significantly
into virtual production, which is awesome.
And so the lines are getting more and more blurred.
But, currently, from the interactive standpoint,
we do have factors such as performance,
specific hardware specs, what platform we're building for,
that kind of puts some constraints around what we can do.
But we're always pushing the boundaries on what's possible there.
But a lot of the skills translate
'cause ultimately we're trying to make things that look awesome.
So traditional VFX artists and other people, like--
That is at the heart of what we're trying to do,
is to make beautiful content that's cutting edge.
Can you explain to us what you mean when you say "real-time"?
So everything is rendering in real time
based on where the person in the experience is looking.
So anywhere that they look at any time can basically be brought
into existence in the headset.
So it's not something like a film where you can run it all out in advance
and you know the frame rate's gonna look good
and everything is actually as you expect it.
There's a lot of variability in the experience when you have a person in there
who is looking around and choosing where the camera is.
I wanna talk a little bit about your individual journeys
and the things that brought you into this industry.
Things that brought you into production.
My last quarter of undergrad, I did not like my degree.
So I decided to go into the graduate program
and studied animation production management.
In my last semester, I learned what VR was,
and I was very intrigued by it,
so I decided to apply to VR studios, and here I am.
What was your undergrad degree in that you decided not to pursue?
Graphic communication, and I studied UX/UI
and I hated being at a computer designing things.
And now I'm at a computer organizing things.
[all chuckle]
I had studied radio, television, film.
I moved on to working at a gaming company where I learned more about virtual reality
and how to demo virtual reality to customers and people.
So eventually after that, I moved on from VR experience and gaming experience,
and now I'm here at a really cool VFX company on the leading edge.
I studied animation illustration.
But I also wasn't really ready to move to LA at the time that I graduated,
so I had a non-industry job for a while.
With my background and my love for storytelling,
I thought VR was a really great storytelling medium,
and I really wanted to get involved.
And so I did a little bit of research,
and I found a program that was run by Oculus,
and I think they actually still run it. It's called Oculus Launchpad.
So I applied to that.
I pitched them an idea, and I got accepted.
And at the same time,
I had found that ILM was hosting Women in VFX panel.
So I came down to do that, and I met a recruiter there,
and she contacted me,
and I just happened to have the right skill set and background
at the time that xLAB was hiring, so it was really fortunate circumstances.
Um-- Well, about 85 years ago--
-[chuckles] No. -[all laugh]
So I studied--
Archaeology is what my bachelor's degree is in.
And I, when I graduated, realized that I didn't really wanna pursue
the kind of graduate level research and a career in academia.
I did not know that you started in archaeology,
so I'm probably gonna call you Indiana Jones from now on.
[Fattouh laughs] Okay. Yeah. That's kind of what I thought too.
-I did have that-- -[all laugh]
I had to think about what else would be possible and so…
I love games. I've loved games my entire life,
and so I actually got a job as a QA tester at Electronic Arts,
and I worked in the gaming industry for about 15 years,
and I remember seeing a trailer for ILMxLAB, and it was like a dream.
It was something I would have written
as a aspirational "I hope somebody could do this."
I applied basically on the spot, and, thankfully, I heard back one day.
It sounds like, from what you're all telling me,
you don't necessarily have to go to school to work in production.
It doesn't have to be what your focus is.
This is something that you can change and get into
even if you didn't start out in school doing this.
Absolutely. I think it's--
Production is a field that takes on skills from other fields as well. Right?
You don't necessarily have to have had that career path from the beginning.
What's one job that you've had in your past
that you felt like really set you up for success to work in production?
Any sort of customer service-orientated job.
For a while, after I graduated high school,
I was working for the California State Parks system,
and that is a very autonomous position.
I think the most impactful job that I held in the past
was working retail for five years.
As part of retail, you have so many different things that you're working on,
more than just ringing up a customer.
You need to be able to speak to different personality types.
You need to be able to be very flexible
based on what schedule may be coming into the day
and what schedule has changed in the middle of the day.
I have worked as a swim instructor and a lifeguard,
and I feel like that's really helped me in production management.
Especially when I was a lifeguard at Disney World.
I had to be clear amongst the music,
amongst the screaming of all the guests,
and ensuring that you're also providing a good experience
for the client and for the guests who are there.
I think, honestly, I really reflect a lot on the time I spent as a software tester.
As a tester, your job is to kind of play the game as a consumer
but also do stress testing and find all of the bugs that are possible.
You kind of learn so many skills of the communication aspect of it,
of how to be constructive in giving feedback to improve things.
We all come from very different backgrounds,
but the one pillar, the one theme I notice,
it's talking to people.
-It's communication. -Yeah.
That's really what it came down to.
Yeah, that's like the, I think, probably the most important aspect
of anybody coming into a production role is being able to communicate clearly,
be really good at de-escalation,
and it really helps to explain ideas to people.
Tell me something that you've learned from working with the production team.
I think one of the things I learned, and kind of wish I knew before,
was just how you don't have to be a perfect fit for every role,
and that it's really important to kind of put yourself out there
and be true to what you are passionate about and what you have put value in.
That's not to say every job is gonna be perfect or a perfect match,
but to just keep trying to find the things that you align with,
and then you'll have such a better chance of being successful at them and growing
when you're surrounding yourself with people and content that you believe in.
You can explore different things, especially the arts.
Even though we are a tech company, I would say I'm not in a technical role.
I'm not an engineer.
I am someone who deals on the more production management side,
the business side.
Once I realized that there are other roles inside of production that allow you
to still be involved in creative and still working with team members,
that's when I got really excited.
And I want people to have that same experience
and know that you can come in and still be part of a team
without being a creative or an engineer or somebody who's extremely technical
and still have an impact on a project.
Perfect. I know we have to go 'cause we have a meeting right now.
Thank you all so much. This was so much fun.
[Barrick, Tejada] Thank you.
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