Today we’d like to introduce you to Sally Slade.
Sally, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
In late 2015, right as I was growing tired of my Pipeline Lead role in the VFX industry, Lap van Luu finally managed to get a headset on me (an early edition HTC Vive, to be precise). It was a gobsmack. I realized immediately that I needed to stop everything I was doing, and join the immersive technology industry.
I threw myself into tutorials, literature and media related to VR, and within a few months found myself employable by the mighty Magnopus. I started my journey very humbly, at a junior rate with a junior title, and earned my place among the professionals within a few more months. From there, I was demonstrably competent in both Design and Engineering, giving me some very unique opportunities to direct and implement small projects or lead efforts in User Experience design and development on larger ones.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It was an overall smooth journey, I recommend this transition to any of my Immersive-curious counterparts in the Visual Effects or Animation industries.
That being said, there has been one point of turbulence in my trajectory: An insistence that I belong in both Design and Engineering was initially difficult to navigate. I have found that many of my contemporaries expect a binary mindset: You’re either good at Art or you’re good at Math. If you pursue them simultaneously, clearly you must be compromising one or both disciplines.
After four years, I am finally finding my footing on how best to fit into a team with such a role. I have a recent role model and the confidence of my producers to thank for this. As a footnote, I would love to see an art show where all contributors are also Engineers or a hackathon where all participants are also Artists. It would be an excellent citation for a new generation of workers who demand respect for hybrid career paths.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Magnopus – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Magnopus is a content creation house: We specialize in making interactive experiences for cutting-edge technologies. When the company formed, that meant challenging visual effects and 360 videos. Now, that means architecting content for AR/VR hardware and other experimental displays.
As a company, I would suggest we are currently most proud of our Virtual Production system, which is a set of custom hardware and VR tools which allows a classically trained filmmaker to enter the set of their film directly, and shoot a movie entirely in a virtual environment, first-hand. We had the incredible opportunity to develop this in collaboration with the cinematographers of Disney’s The Lion King. Once the film was finished, our tools were absorbed into Epic’s Unreal Engine 4.23 package, and released for public consumption.
I would venture what sets Magnopus apart is our company culture: We have nurtured something very special when it comes to problem-solving. We are able to come together as a team, admit when we don’t know something, and resolve it together through research, development, and playtesting. There is plenty of room to be wrong and to learn from those trials, which has lead to massive growth at all levels and an uncommon bond between coworkers.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
I am very excited about the future: Though I am bound by NDA from discussing the future of Magnopus, I will happily tell you of my own plans.
In early 2019, my partner and I identified a problem we were having in our civic lives: We had no idea how to track what bills were being introduced by our Legislators. To solve this problem, we wrote a scripted tool called Billbot [http://www.instagram.com/billbot.california], which pulls information about congressional sessions from government websites. It then composites summaries of that information on top of beautiful stock photography and uploads it to Instagram (our present social media platform of choice).
By subscribing to our own output, we were able to stay informed by consuming a drip-feed of aesthetically pleasing information throughout the 2019-2020 session. We’re very excited to perfect this tool in 2020, and put our energy behind promoting it as a solution for fellow Californians, who might be as stumped about Legislation as we were.
In late December, we incorporated ourselves as a Non-Profit called Local Changes [http://www.localchanges.org] in order to inspire confidence in our users, and recruit volunteers to develop additional civic tools.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.magnopus.com/
Image Credit:
Lecture image courtesy of “Trojan Horse was a Unicorn”
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