Hacker Cinema
Jurassic Punk
2022 · Film · documentary · 90 min
Directed by Scott Leberecht
Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams is a pioneer in computer animation. His digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park transformed Hollywood in 1993, but an appetite for anarchy and reckless disregard for authority may have cost him the recognition he deserved.
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Apparently it's available to stream for free:
> Steve 'Spaz' Williams is a pioneer in computer animation. His digital dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK transformed Hollywood in 1993, but an appetite for anarchy and reckless disregard for authority may have cost him the recognition he deserved. Directed by Scott Leberecht
Jurassic Punk (2022) 80mins
https://watch.plex.tv/movie/jurassic-punk-2022
Recommend "Jurassic Punk" (2022) - the documentary about Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams who is featured in this interview. It covers T2 as well as Jurassic park and goes into the politics inside ILM,
I recommend that naysayers for technologies like Cursor watch the documentary Jurassic Punk. When comparing the current AI landscape to the era of computer graphics emerging in film, the parallels are pretty staggering to me.
There is a very vocal old guard who are stubborn about ditching their 10,000+ hours master-level expertise to start from zero and adapt to the new paradigm. There is a lot of skepticism. There are a lot of people who take pride in how hard coding should be, and the blood and sweat they've invested.
If you look at AI from 10,000 feet, I think what you'll see is not AGI ruining the world, but rather LLMs limited by regression, eventually training on their own hallucinations, but good enough in their current state to be amazing tools. I think that Cursor, and products like it, are to coding what Photoshop was to artists. There are still people creating oil paintings, but the industry — and the profits — are driven by artists using Photoshop.
Cursor makes coders more efficient, and therefore more profitable, and anyone NOT using Cursor in a hiring pool of people who ARE using it will be left holding the short straw.
If you are an expert level software engineer, you will recognize where Cursor's output is bad, and you will be able to rapidly remediate. That still makes you more valuable and more efficient. If you're an expert level software engineer, and you don't use Cursor, you will be much slower, and it is just going to reduce your value more and more over time.
The documentary "Jurassic Punk" tells a story about Steve Williams, a VFX artist who was central to the animation presented in several blockbuster films, including The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15095920/
Williams did not receive credit, nor benefit financially.