Scott Houston started out as a Cobol coder and is now chief
technology officer for WETA, producer of the digital effects on The
Lord of the Rings films. Karl Cushing reports
If you are looking for a challenging and rewarding IT career head
for the silver screen. That is the advice of Scott Houston, who
worked on the latest Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers.
"I have spent my entire 22-year career in the IT sector but the
film industry has to be the most demanding and time-critical I have
ever worked in," says Houston, who is chief technical officer at
digital effects company WETA Digital in Wellington, New Zealand.
Although being an IT professional on a movie like The Two Towers is
high-pressured, challenging and demanding, Houston says it is also
exhilarating and highly satisfying when the team delivers.
Houston says he became obsessed with The Lord of the Rings project
when, as a salesman for Silicon Graphics, he began managing the
WETA account. He finally got the chance to join the project team at
the end of April. Luckily for Houston there was already a world
class IT team in place and this helped to ease the transition into
the new role. "Having a bullet-proof hide did come in handy from
time to time," he adds.
A high-profile movie like The Two Towers, which is so heavily
reliant on network-hungry digital effect production to bring all
the orcs, elves and goblins to life, creates some major challenges
for a chief technology officer - not least coping with the scale
and speed of growth in the facility. In the last six months
Houston's 30-strong team had to triple the online storage capacity
and quadruple the processing power available to the facility. "This
was all while we were in a 24x7 production environment," he says.
"It was like changing the engines on a Boeing 747 whilst flying at
10,000 feet, at 900km/h, with 400 people on board. Thankfully the
plane didn't crash, and neither did we, and the movie got made."
A lot of the key technical challenges Houston faced mirror those of
chief technology officers in the commercial sphere. A key
consideration was that the film's producer New Line wanted the
project to follow the central structure of JRR Tolkien's Lord of
the Rings story, which is a trilogy. This meant building an IT
platform that was sufficiently robust to last until the third
movie, The Return of the King, and beyond. It also had to be
scalable enough to meet the ever-increasing demands of visual
effects production and to manage the integration of new
technologies. Enabling future expandability to 10 Gigabit Ethernet
was essential.
Houston didn't work on the first Lord of the Rings movie, The
Fellowship of the Ring, but he says the increase in the technology
used for The Two Towers has been "exponential", resulting in a
massive overhaul of its IT infrastructure. For the first film, WETA
used a high-speed network to handle its multiple gigabit
throughputs and enable the digital effect production teams to
analyse and cross-reference the digital film segments quickly and
efficiently. WETA believes that infrastructure, based on technology
from Foundry Networks, significantly helped to reduce production
time and cost. However, for The Two Towers it has had to invest in
some more powerful network switches and 450 new dual-processor
servers.
Houston says working on the project represents one of the
highlights of his 22-year IT career. He says his job is "immensely
rewarding" and he would not hesitate to recommend the movie sector
to IT professionals in other industries.
"The attraction of being on the leading edge of technology has
always kept me in the IT sector and I can honestly say the work we
are doing at WETA is right on the leading edge, using the latest
technology to its maximum potential," he says. "The work is never
boring, always challenging and if you are lucky enough to work on a
project like The Lord of the Rings you get something to tell your
grandchildren about."
WETA's networks
For The Fellowship of the Ring, WETA used
a high-speed network based on technology from Foundry Networks,
with storage from NetApps and StorageTek. For the latest
installment, WETA added Foundry's Bigiron Layer 3 network switches,
three Bigiron 15-slot chassis, and two Bigiron 8-slot chassis with
multiple gigabit copper and fibre interfaces. WETA will test 10
Gigabit Ethernet between switches and high-end filters next year.
Its dedicated render wall, which turns the special effects and
footage into film sequences, now has 1,200 processors.
How Scott Houston's career developed
- 1980 Began a data processing course in New Zealand
- 1981-1983 Cobol programming using batch punch cards and systems
design
- 1984-1986 Cobol programming in London, where he designed, wrote
and implemented supermarket chain Sainsbury's maternity pay system
and worked on the computerisation of the London Stock
Exchange
- 1987-1990 Returned to New Zealand and set up a PC sales and
services company with a friend
- 1991 "I tried to sell IBM AS/400s and discovered virtual
reality," says Houston
- 1992-1995 London again. "Tried to find, write or discover the
virtual reality killer app," he says
- 1996-1998 "Marriage and young children meant safe, stable and
secure channel management role for Compaq, back in New
Zealand"
- 1998-2002 "The old virtual reality bug bit again", resulting in
a sales role at supplier Silicon Graphics, where he started to
manage the WETA account and fell in love with the Lord of the Rings
project
- 2002 Got a chance to join the WETA project team.