Ed Kramer reveals twisting backstory of his life – on route to becoming a Senior Technical Director at Industrial Light & Magic from 1994 thru 2006
Matt Wallin’s 8111 blog is a great way to learn about the lives of many of the early artists who called Industrial Light & Magic home during the exciting early years of photorealistic CGI created for blockbuster movies in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
Ed takes the listener through his earliest experiences doing CGI in the late 1970’s – using punchcard technology – at the University of Texas film school. He had earned his Master of Arts Degree in computer animation in 1980, at a time when nobody had even heard the term CGI.
He recounts a twisting path through numerous jobs, starting in Hollywood in 1981, where he animated the following year’s World Series opening on NBC by plugging wires and turning knobs on an analog device called Scanimate. Ed works his way through jobs in LA, New York, Atlanta, and at NASA in Houston, where the digital CGI tools evolved from the simple geometry available with the Bosch FGS-4000 to the more complex and increasingly more photo-realistic renderings from Wavefront Technologies.
Ed’s career ultimately takes him to the hills of western Massachusetts to work on a project with visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull, and he relates the crazy story of how ILM tried but couldn’t find him because of that project.
Ed then opens up about his projects during twelve years as a TD and Sequence Supervisor at ILM, including creating the Scarab Beetles from The Mummy and the Rock Monster from Galaxy Quest. Along the way the conversation moves from recently-deceased baseball legend Hank Aaron to music legend John Lennon to funny stories about the invention of CGI fur technology for Jumanji in 1995 – and the happy-accident origin of “Pokey” the rhino.
The podcast can be found at this link: https://mattwallin.com/8111 (May need to scroll down to find Ed’s interview.)