Music is blaring in a downtown nightclub closed for a private party. Screens mounted around the venue run a movie trailer and a credits list, attracting small crowds that drift up to point out names. Beside the dance floor is a photo booth and a table loaded with props. It’s the wrap party for Hotel Transylvania 2, an unexpected place to find someone with a PhD in astronomy.
Laura Kasian is a physicist who puts her analytical skills to use in visual effects at Sony ImageWorks in Vancouver, Canada. Working on everything from the gritty Suicide Squad to the children’s movie Storks, Kasian operates behind the scenes to smooth out the many technical elements that go into creating the movies we love.
Kasian’s unusual career path demonstrates that physics is about learning skills instead of facts. She completed her bachelor’s in physics at the University of Winnipeg, then pursued a graduate degree in astronomy at the University of British Columbia. She overlapped the last year of her doctorate with her first year of law school, earning her PhD in 2012 and her law degree in 2013.
Kasian chatted with Physics Today’s Mika McKinnon about leaving academics to find a physics career she could truly love.
PT: You work at Sony ImageWorks. But you have a PhD in astronomy, and you also went to law school. What’s the story?
KASIAN: I did my graduate research on pulsars. I was trying to find more of them so we could do better statistics in understanding them. But at some point in my PhD, I realized I didn’t want to follow the academic path. My interest wandered. Once I knew what I didn’t want to do, I tried to look for what to do next.
I had friends in law school, and it seemed like there were plenty of things to do. Intellectual property law particularly looked like a good fit with my science background. I applied, got in, and was keen to start right away, so I began law school without actually finishing my PhD.
In my first year of law school I did most of the work to finish my thesis, but I didn’t defend until well into my second year. It was a full year of overlap. In hindsight, not the best plan!
PT: Did you notice any similarities between astronomy research and law school?
KASIAN: Both are about identifying a problem, breaking it down into sections, and coming up with a solution. I learned this in physics writing lab reports and structuring problem sets, but it’s the same idea in law.
PT: What happened after you finished school?
KASIAN: I thought to myself, “I’ve done my PhD, I’ve done law school, I can do anything I want to do.” I didn’t have any reason I needed to work as a lawyer, so I opened myself up to other possibilities. I spent a year in entry-level positions with local companies, and I got more interested in business processes.
I don’t have a background in computer science, but I learned how to code in grad school. That allowed me to look at the systems for the companies I worked for and observe how they do things. When I found this job, I thought the department was really neat. I was able to dig in, work hard, and learn a lot. I’m happy here.
PT: So what exactly do you do?
KASIAN: I’m a production services technician lead. I’m in charge of the day-to-day tasks that support the production teams and artists.
Animated movies and visual effects in live-action movies are a technical art form with lots of moving pieces. Look developers create the style of a movie. Modelers create the characters and sets. Animators make everything move. Another team deals with surfaces, adding textures and shading to differentiate between glossy plastics, fuzzy monster fur, and translucent skin. Effects artists simulate smoke, rain, or explosions at the same time a team of lighters adds imaginary light sources to transform a scene into something beautiful. The rendered scenes go to compositors to tweak the colors until the look is consistent through the whole movie. My job is to make all those moving pieces fit together.
PT: What does that look like?
KASIAN: Anything that comes from the client movie studio, we process and put it in its proper location so that it’s ready to be used by everyone later in the production pipeline. Those are things like raw footage or concept sketches, anything that artists need to reference in creating visual effects for live-action or animated movies.
Inside the studio, I keep an eye on data that artists submit to our computer networks—the render farm—for processing. My job is to fix errors as they come up, tweaking code so that simulations run properly, animations are generated, and abstract code is rendered into individual images.
I also assign how resources are allocated. I’ll say, “Okay, this shot is a priority today for our movie. Anything that’s in this shot will get priority over the others and will get more [processing] cores per frame.” That artist will get her shots back quicker than other artists who need to wait their turn.
PT: What’s a shot?
KASIAN: Shots are uninterrupted series of frames. Shots run from just a few seconds up to a full scene, as long as they’re from the same camera angle. A sequence is a series of related shots, like a conversation from different camera angles.
In a given sequence, there might be specific computer-generated characters, buildings, and other objects present in the scene. Depending on what’s happening in the scene and on the camera angle, only some of those elements may be visible in each of the individual shots. So there may be characters, buildings, grass, trees, and fire, all of which need to be pieced together to create the final result. Each of those pieces would be created by individual artists, and the end result is generated as a product of the overall visual-effects pipeline that is in place.
PT: How do data move around inside the studio?
KASIAN: A whole bunch of things happen at the same time, so it’s important to be organized. Sometimes a movie has some shots finaled [marked as ready to be included in the movie] while other parts of the script are still being written. A shot can be in the process of final special effects and lighting when a character’s design changes, so every frame with that character needs to be updated by every department.
It’s a matter of people knowing where to look for something later. You can put data wherever you want. But if you have large amounts of data, how do you put it where someone else is going to know where to look for it?
PT: You’ve worked on live-action movies such as Ghostbusters and animated ones like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. How are the challenges different?
KASIAN: Live-action movies tend to have more moving parts, since there can be a lot of reference materials and raw footage, or plates, that need to be carefully handled. The plates need to be processed and labeled correctly, since the work the artists produce and eventually send back to the client will be set up based on those files. The work flow on live-action movies generally tends to be more fast-paced.
Working on fully animated movies can pose a different set of challenges. We often work on the full film rather than just a portion, as is common with live-action movies. Fully animated movies require a lot of rendering since the whole movie needs to be created inside the computer. The volume of shots means we need to have our work flows set up to handle a higher throughput.
Another difference is the client. Their timing and specifications can change how you structure things. It’s about adapting to a show’s needs and communicating issues or asking questions when I think there might be something I can do on my end to improve the lives of people in other departments.
PT: Who are the clients?
KASIAN: Movies are made by whole teams of companies. The production company is the client. Visual effects companies like mine bid on projects. For example, I worked on Suicide Squad, and Warner Brothers was the client. Sony Pictures Animation was the client for Hotel Transylvania.
When artists render individual frames, I process them into movies to show the client. Directors and producers watch the shots and give feedback on what to change or approve it as the final look for the movie.
PT: What things did you learn from physics that are useful now?
KASIAN: What drew me to this work was that it’s problem solving. I also like that I’m surrounded by all these departments that work with physics in some way. Other industries don’t have that.
I had experience moving around large amounts of data from my graduate work in physics and astronomy. If something needs to be edited, I know how to just jump in the code and fix it. Mostly, physics taught me that I can look at whatever problem and figure out a way to solve it.
It’s super valuable to be mathematically literate. I wouldn’t say I use that on a daily basis, but it’s nice to know I could if I needed it. It makes me unafraid of anything technical.
PT: You mentioned that physics is used in a lot of the other departments as well. How so?
KASIAN: Effects artists use simulations for water, fire, explosions, and things like that. Animators use physics in how things move. All the ways that light is rendered and how shaders function rely on physics. Physics is built into the tools artists use.
PT: What’s the most rewarding part of working in the film industry?
KASIAN: It’s really interesting to see how everything fits together. I didn’t really have a concept of how many pieces by how many people needed to come together to make it all work.
PT: Has working in movies changed how you watch them?
KASIAN: I still feel like I’m a bit of an observer because I’m on the technical side and don’t create the content. I’ll notice details that I didn’t notice before. One of the things that I find really interesting is just how important color is, and how much color correction matters.
PT: What advice do you have for other physicists wanting to work in the entertainment industry?
KASIAN: There’s a lot of interesting work out there. Be curious about things, and try to learn more about what you find out. Pay attention to the types of problems you like to solve. What you learn in physics can apply to your entire life. You learn how to solve problems and to infer the pieces that are missing.
